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Google Comes One Step Closer To “Social Search”

January 12, 2012 No comments yet

By Matthew Barker 
Google has recently announced a major new change in the way it organises its search results, bringing us one step closer to the future of “social search”, where search results are heavily influenced by the behaviour and interactions of your friends and networks on social media tools and platforms.

The social signals in question are shares and +1′s made on Google+, the search giant’s own social media tool and potential Facebook rival. In a nutshell, webpages or content that have been “plus-one’d” by your own friends and connections are now being highlighted within the normal search results pages.

It is all part of Google’s long-running mission of showing each user the most relevant and useful results possible. The thinking goes that if your friends and family like something, the chances are you will like it too. Or, in Google’s own words:

We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships.

This is one of many steps in the long walk towards truly social search. As search engine technology becomes ever more advanced, they will be using signals like these to determine the popularity and usefulness of each website. After all, if hundreds or thousands of individuals recommend a certain page using Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc, the page must be doing something right, and therefore deserves to be more prominent in search results pages.

Social signals like these will become one of the most important ranking signals of the very near future, and to achieve success in this new landscape means taking a very different view of our websites and the kind of content we put on them.

Think of a social interaction (be it a “Like, “Tweet, “+1″ or any other form of interaction) as a real-world recommendation. Users are reading your content and are recommending it to their friends. To elicit this kind of reaction, your content must be truly top-notch. It’s not often people go out of their way to recommend newspaper or magazine articles to their friends – it has to be extraordinarily interesting first. The same now applies to website content. Your site must be filled with extraordinarily interesting/useful/amusing content in order to elicit the social signals that will lead to search engine success.

So, what does this mean for web marketers and travel businesses? Get ready for the change. The future of search is very different to what we are used to, and only those who invest now in great and creative content will reap all the rewards of the coming era of social search.

Talk to us about accessing our unique network of professional travel writers and how our Travel Content Network can help you take advantage of the changing search landscape.

Academic Study Proves On-Site Quality Is Essential For Search

December 19, 2011 No comments yet

By Matthew Barker

Given the massive importance of search & online marketing to business and the entire economy, it’s strange that changes and developments in the world’s biggest search engines don’t break out of industry news websites and into the mainstream press more often.

But Google’s Panda Updates (more info on what these were and how they affect Travel here) were of sufficient importance and caused enough ripples in the “real” world that even non-SEO types have started to take notice. In particular, a team of computer scientists at the University of Glasgow who have just published research on the outcomes of Google’s war on low quality websites, which was covered in this article in the New Scientist.

The research demonstrated that Google has been largely successful in its aggressive push against derivative, uninformative and thin content (typically found on the web’s infamous “Content Farms”). In one example given, the researchers tested results for the phrase “How to train for a Marathon” before and after Google’s updates. Where the results were previously stuffed with low grade, barely useful tips such as “buy a good pair of running shoes”, the  new results were dominated by high quality, well researched content provided by authoritative sources such as Runner’s World magazine.

So there we have it: the academic research has proven what we already knew: Successful websites must invest in high quality, authoritative and creative content.

What Do Google+ Profiles For Businesses Mean For Travel?

November 8, 2011 No comments yet

By Matthew Barker

The much anticipated and entirely inevitable has happened: Google+ profiles are now available for businesses. I’ll give some instructions on how to set up your profile here, followed by some wider thoughts on the implications & opportunities.

Creating a Google+ Profile 

Setting up the profie is a simple process, and is very similar to creating a Facebook business page. Start with the Create A Page tool. There are two main options for travel businesses: online agencies will want to place themselves into the “Company” category. Hotels, shop-front agencies, tour operators and anyone else with a physical location will want to choose “Local business”. (Local businesses will be given additional options such as maps, hours of operation, phone numbers etc. For now this is entirely separate to any Google Places profiles you may have.)

From there it’s a simple process of completing the forms, adding your tag line and logo (have some fun with the “Creative Kit”), announcing your new profile with Circles from your own personal profile, and hitting Finish. Hey presto, welcome to Google+.

OK, Now What?

Good question. Creating the profile is the easy bit; what you should do with it is a trickier question.

At the most basic level, using your profile will be very similar to Facebook. You can post photos, video, comments etc, with the aim of increasing the number of people in your business’ Circle. Circles are the Google+ equivalent to Facebook fans. You can only communicate with people who have chosen to add your page to their Circles. To do this you need to be creating interesting, valuable and useful content and sharing it via your Google+ profile, much in the same way as you would on Facebook.

The kind of thing you can be posting includes:

  • New blog articles
  • Cool travel photos
  • Destination restaurant recommendations
  • Museum guides
  • … and any other kind of travel guide or resource that relates to your services

Remember, the key is quality. You will only be accepted into people’s online social life if you offer something they’re interested in. Also be sure to avoid the hard sell: use this tool to build your brand, your expertise and your reputation. Don’t use it to promote your latest tour package.

You can encourage people to visit your new profile by linking to it, or by creating a Google+ logo. This tool gives you the code you need to create your own logo.

As with Facebook and Twitter, don’t just stick the logo on your site and expect people to click it. You need to give people a reason or incentive to click. Include a Call To Action with your logos, such as “Follow Us For Our Latest Travel Advice” or “Follow Us For Exclusive Deals And Offers”.

An important point to bear in mind: if you already have the +1 button on your pages (and if you don’t you can get it here), people who click +1 on one of your pages will not automatically add your business profile to their Circles. They will still need to visit your profile and click the “Add To Circles” button.

This is a major difference to Facebook, where clicking the “Like” button on your site means they start to follow your Facebook page. My guess is that this will make accruing followers on Google+ more difficult than accruing followers on Facebook. Which makes generating and promoting excellent content all the more important.

Some interesting features

One of the things Google+ has that Facebook doesn’t is the group chat feature, known as a Hangout. This is an exciting new way of communicating with existing and potential customers. Be creative in the way you use it – you could use it as a live chat assistance tool, for holding Q&A sessions on your destination, or whatever else you come up with.

Circles are basically a way of segmenting your connections. The default groups for business profiles are “Following,” “Customers,” “VIPs,” and “Team members” but you can add as many groups as you like. This gives you the ability to customize your messages for different groups, much in the same way as you would segment an email promotion to different client groups. Every time you make a post, you can determine which Circle should see it. Think creatively about how you will use your content to communicate with different groups, based on what they want or need to know.

In summary, Google+ should form part of your wider content & social strategy. For advice with creating that strategy or with generating the quality of content that you need to succeed, just get in touch.

Encouraging Words From Bing’s Search Team

November 7, 2011 No comments yet

By Matthew Barker

I was doing some light reading on Google’s Panda Update the other day and just before I dozed off in front of my screen (be very grateful:  we trawl the SEO websites so you don’t have to) I came across a quote from Duane Forrester, a senior manager and SEO expert at Microsoft, parent of the increasingly important Bing search engine.

Duane was speaking at an SEO conference, talking about the boundaries between legitimate link development and junky link spam. Like Google, Bing is keen to reform the link as the main currency of search engine rankings, making it harder to game the system by buying links in one form or another and tricking your way up the Search Engine Results Page.

Duane was talking about article spamming, an old technique that involves the mass submission of low grade articles to “content spinners” that submit automatically churned versions of your original article to multiple content directories, with each one supposedly creating new links to your website and giving a boost in rankings.

The problem is that the search engines are a lot smarter than most of us. They have wised up to this, and probably won’t take much notice of the links that this method produces.

Duane had another suggestion: rather than swamp the web with junk, take the time to create some genuinely useful material. Something that someone can read, value, act upon and share. Then find an authority website related to your field and ask them if they want to use this piece of content from an industry expert. To say thanks, the website will cite their source – including a link back to your website.

A few authority links like that are worth all the spam links in the world. And guess what – they might even send some real traffic referrals rather than just influencing your rankings… And that was the whole point of linking in the first place!

Well we at Hit Riddle were happy to get the words of encouragement. After all, the approach that Duane described is the foundation of everything that we do. You’ll find no article spam here. We commission only top grade material from genuine experts and share it on the most relevant and reputable websites we can find. Just our small contribution to ridding the web of spam and junk… while helping potential leads find your site at the same time!

PPC Or SEO?

October 5, 2011 No comments yet

By Matthew Barker

First things first, we’ve got an interest to declare here: yesterday we won our Google Adwords Certification. That means we’re allowed to display a fancy new logo on our website:

It also means we’ve officially proven our expertise and ability to help clients invest their valuable marketing dollars (or pounds/euros/pesos) in the baffling but potentially rewarding world of Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

How PPC actually works is the subject of another article, the question here is what about the relationship between PPC and SEO – the “organic” traffic you get from free search rankings: which is best?

The easy answer is “neither”, they both serve very different purposes and if used properly, they can interact and support each other.

If used properly, PPC is great for generating controlled bursts of targeted traffic & leads for your business. If you have a short term promotion or offer, are targeting a specific season or holiday, or if your phones have just gone quiet and you could use some more leads, a PPC campaign is the perfect short term solution.

It always takes a while for a brand new websites to start generating its own organic traffic, and PPC is a useful crutch to jump start the business while the site takes root.

But in the long term, most businesses aim to wean themselves off PPC as the main source of leads. The reason is two fold: firstly, organic traffic is free. Secondly, strong organic traffic is the by-product of a well developed, content rich website – and that is the ultimate goal for any site owner. The better the site, the more leads it will bring you.

But, that’s not the end of the story. The ideal scenario is a mix of the two traffic sources, each one serving its own distinct purpose. If the “heavy lifting” is being done by organic traffic, a targeted, smart PPC campaign can support your business in a number of ways:

  • Improved Click Thru Rates: the data shows an increase in overall clicks if you have a result in the paid and organic sections of a search results page
  • Improved brand awareness: even if people are not clicking on your paid ads, the fact that they’re there means your name stands a stronger chance of sinking in
  • Targeted leads: organic traffic is great for driving general traffic, PPC is great for leads on specific promotions or deals

In more general terms, think of the search results page as a piece of real estate. The more of that valuable space you can occupy the better. Taking a result in the paid section, plus the first two organic results will win you the lion’s share of the traffic.

Occupying even more of the real estate with review pages, product results, image/video results all increases your share. But that’s another story…

Creating And Using Effective Content For A Successful Travel Website

August 30, 2011 No comments yet

By Matthew Barker

Thinking about improving your content? Check out our new Travel Content Network.

Every trade has its clichés and in the world of online marketing the phrase “Content Is King” gets bandied around so often it has almost lost its original meaning and has become a euphemism for the kind of mass-produced, churned-out content that seems to have taken over much of the Web.

There was a time that a travel agency website could get by with a few pages of itinerary descriptions copied from their operator, some destination descriptions, hotel pages and a contact form. Throw in some paid links and a few other shady tricks and it will have stood a reasonable chance of competing in the search engine rankings.

Thankfully, those days are over and the cliché has been updated to Quality Content Is King.

The major search engines have been the driving force behind this change, taking an increasingly aggressive approach to discerning between high and low quality content. These changes made headlines earlier this year with Google’s now famous Panda Update which saw a huge number of sites fall foul of the increasingly stringent rules, bombing out of the search rankings as a result.

Because of all this, the meaning of “quality content” has changed significantly. Content that is simply unique to your site and not published elsewhere first, is no longer sufficient. To classify as good quality these days, content has to fit a number of requirements:

  • It has to offer something of genuine use or interest to your audience
  • It has to be trustworthy
  • It has to be written by someone who knows their subject
  • It has to be accurate; factually, grammatically and in spelling, and be well edited
  • It should include original information, reporting or analysis
  • It should be comprehensive, substantial and detailed

Sure, some of this stuff is beyond the ability of even the latest search engine algorithms to detect but remember – you’re not writing for the search engines. You’re writing for people.

You’re not chasing the latest algorithm change, you’re creating a content-rich website that visitors will want to share, “Like”, comment on and link to.

Search engines are not just assessing the face-value quality of your content, they are also looking at the resulting clicks, interactions and links. And to achieve that, you need to invest in creative, compelling content.

What does that mean for travel websites? Well, we’re more fortunate than most sectors because we operate within a “content rich” industry. Just think about the resources your website could potentially offer:

  • Short destination guides, broken down city-by-city or into individual attractions. Host as a .pdf file to get SEO value, but also request email addresses in return for the download = future marketing opportunity
  • Travel stories and trip reports – a blog is the perfect place for this
  • Restaurant reviews & guides
  • Self-guided walking tours
  • Special interest how-to guides (adventure sports, bird watching, surfing, photography, etc)

The list of possibilities goes on and on. It could even include other media such as photography, video and audio – the initial investment is higher but the reward is often greater.

This is the kind of material that a successful travel site needs to publish. Each page represents a new resource for the search engines to index and rank, and each resource represents something new for your customers – a reason for them to visit again and eventually buy from you.

All in all, the phrase Quality Content Is King is still a cliché, but the thing about clichés is that they tend to be true.

All well and good, you’re probably saying. But who has the time to write all that? Fortunately, you don’t need to write it all yourself. Take a look at our Travel Content Network and talk to us about developing a solution for your needs.

 

New Network Addresses “Urgent Need” For Quality Travel Content

August 30, 2011 No comments yet

Travel businesses, websites and blogs seeking to improve their online presence have been given a boost to their Web marketing efforts with the launch of an online Travel Content Network, offering either free or highly affordable solutions to improve search engine rankings, visitor numbers and leads.

Created by Hit Riddle, a Web marketing consultancy specialising in the travel industry, the Travel Content Network has been developed based on the latest trends in search marketing which have emphasised the role of unique, high-quality content as the most important factor in improving Web rankings and performance.

The network allows website owners to request specially-commissioned content from a network of more than 200 writers, all of whom have in-depth knowledge of travel destinations and whose interests cover every aspect of travel from premium hospitality to backpacker adventures.

The service is aimed at sites as diverse as flight and hotel booking engines, tour operators, hotel chains, travel guides and independent travel bloggers. In each case, website owners have an ever growing need for a reliable source of high-quality content.

The network’s team of contributors include professional travel writers whose work has appeared  in publications such as Time Out, CNN Traveller, Travel+Leisure, The New York Times, Lonely Planet, Footprint, and hundreds of other outlets.

The network can be used for commissioning the various types of content that are now required for a successful travel website: concise blog articles, in-depth destination information, travel guides, recommendations, itinerary descriptions, newsletter articles and more.

Photography, video and audio are also available for certain destinations.

With an innovative bidding system, users can specify their rate, deadline and any other requirements before the assignment is allocated to the relevant contributors. Users can either request one-off pieces or packages of content to be delivered on a rolling basis.

Alternatively, website owners who join Hit Riddle’s publisher partner network can access a more limited supply of content free of charge.

The Travel Content Network was born out of Hit Riddle’s approach to online marketing, which is rooted in the principle that quality content drives high value traffic.

The impetus for this approach has been growing ever since the major search engines began implementing updates which heavily penalised sites for using poor quality, generic or duplicated content.

These refinements to search engine algorithms have placed even more significance on the relevance and usefulness of content, and the frequency with which it is published.

However, the commissioning, writing and editing of appropriate content can present a challenge to many businesses with competing demands on time and budget, a need that the Travel Content Network has been created to address.

Matthew Barker, Managing Partner of Hit Riddle, said: “Since Google’s most recent update which reinforced the mantra that ‘quality content is king,’ we have seen a rocketing and urgent need for the kind of professional travel material that our team of writers produces.

“Long gone are the days when a successful travel site could be built on a hodgepodge of recycled content and a few pages of tour descriptions copied from the operator’s website. These days success is driven by dynamic blogs, a high volume of material that is genuinely useful to your readers, large, content-rich websites, travel guides and destination information, and anything else that can benefit your potential clients.

“Each time you create and publish a piece of content like this you are sending a signal to the search engines to say ‘We’re still here and we’re still publishing great stuff’. In return, they will reward your site with better rankings and more traffic.”

“The great thing about our network is that we’re all writers by trade. We know what counts as good writing, and we know how to write for people, not for search engines. The outcome is better content and a better Web for all, and that’s something to celebrate.”

Contact Information

For more details or interviews, contact Matthew Barker: matt@hitriddle.com, (+44)997192655 or skype: matt.hitriddle

How Big Is Your Footprint? Two Additional Traffic Generation Strategies

August 18, 2011 No comments yet

By Matthew Barker

Your website acts as a magnet, attracting visits from people who are searching for your services. You can increase the strength of your magnet by making it larger or, increasing your online footprint, i.e. the amount of “space” that your website occupies on the Web.

One of the easiest and most effective ways of doing this is by running an onsite blog. Each post you create constitutes a new page on your website and, if you post frequently enough, it is the easiest way of growing your online footprint with interesting, relevant information.

Over time, the blog will become the biggest single generator of search traffic to your site. In order to make the most of your blog, follow the following guidelines:

  • Make sure your blog is installed onto your domain, i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/blog, otherwise you’ll be losing out on all the benefits
  • Take a creative approach to your content; write varied, compelling and useful material, and aim to offer something of use or value to your potential clients. Specific travel advice, destination information or city guides are all great article ideas
  • Configure your blog correctly; set the permalinks to include article titles (i.e. www.yourwebsite.com/blog/top-5-BA-restaurants)
  • Link to the rest of your site; link to your home and product pages from your articles, and create a large, conspicuous Call To Action button from your blog’s sidebar leading to a top selling product page, or contact form.

You can do all this and much more with WordPress, a free blogging platform that we use for this blog.

Blogs are also very effective at improving your site’s overall ranking potential. Search engines prefer sites that frequently publish new content, and blogs are very effective at “pinging” them to announce each new post. If the search engines see your site as a frequent source of quality, fresh content, they will come back to visit more often, increasing your chances of higher rankings.

A slightly more advanced strategy would be to create a series of static pages, all optimized around specific and highly targeted search terms that are closely related to a specific product or service.

Each page must contain entirely unique, high quality content that offers something of genuine benefit to your potential clients. The pages must be fully optimized using appropriate meta titles & H1 headers and, finally, should be interlinked to form a web that focuses around a core product page.

For example:

 Static pages example

Provided your pages contain genuinely useful information and are properly optimized, this is a very effective way of delivering additional resources to potential clients and, at the same time, creating new signals to the search engines about the relevancy & quality of your content. Not only can it benefit the search performance of the core page, it will also add new pages to your index, each one attracting their own share of search traffic.

Aim to create a mini web around all your highest performing product pages to improve their visibility and performance. Ideally you would add a short contact form onto each page, to leverage highly targeted leads from all that new traffic.

Use both tips to continually grow your online footprint and watch your organic traffic rise! Contact us for more details on how to implement either of these strategies.

A Rant On “Link Building” Schemes

July 29, 2011 1 comment

By Matthew Barker

The other day one of our clients forwarded me an email he’d received from an SEO scheme that made some pretty impressive promises:

“The SEO Secret Weapon!”

“Your Websites To The Top Of Google For Whatever Keywords You Want!”

“Page 1 Rankings, Completely Automated By Our System!”

And so on.

Our client was understandably interested – well, who wouldn’t be? So he asked me for my thoughts. The following is an expanded version of the rant I sent him, and it goes to the heart of what separates legitimate online marketing from the work of spammers and con artists.

We all know that links are an important part to improving search engine rankings. In the most basic sense, a link from one site to yours counts as a “confidence vote” in your site’s authority and is used as a signal by search engines to determine how important your website is, and how well it should be ranked.

More links from better sources will help improve your rankings. Fact.

The problem is that over the years this simple fact has spawned a plethora of bottom-feeding spammers who have created ever more complex systems for “building” links with the sole purpose of gaming the search engines and tricking them into inflating the rankings for sites that don’t deserve them.

The scheme that our client was asking about is one of the latest (and, in fairness, most advanced) of a long line of these link building Ponzi schemes. Here’s how they work:

The scheme owner creates or buys hundreds, maybe thousands, of websites and blogs, usually old expired domains that they can scoop up at a bargain price, while retaining the age and authority that the previous site had built up.

Once you’ve paid your membership fee (typically several hundred dollars a month) you are allowed to submit a content stream; some articles you have written that include links back to your site.

The scheme then uses its software to “spin” or re-write your articles many hundreds of times, eventually churning out illegible gibberish that is unreadable to the human eye but, crucially, not recognizable by the search engines as duplicate content.

This garbage is then posted on the scheme’s network of sites, each time creating links back to your website. Using a technique like this you can build many thousands of new inbound links to your site and, in theory, see real and direct gains in your rankings.

It’s called “spamdexing” (spam + indexing) and it falls far outside the terms of use of all the major search engines.

Ok, you might say. But we’re all in business here, and if it works, it works. So what’s the problem?

Well, in practice there are many problems.

Firstly there is a large and inescapable risk in tying your link building strategies to a spam-based system like this. The tech guys working for the major search engines are a lot smarter than the folks building these link building schemes and it is only a matter of time before their large anti-spam teams update the algorithms to catch up on link cheaters.

The last time this happened, a lot of search marketers, including some very well established brands were caught out and a lot of time, money and rankings were lost.

An even worse prospect is that the search engines identify your site as participating in the scheme and penalize your rankings or possibly de-index your site altogether.

Business is about using good judgment to take acceptable risks. I can’t think of many website owners who would consider bombing out of the rankings an acceptable risk.

Secondly there is the inconvenient truth that these schemes are becoming less effective. There was a time that search engines counted your inbound links and ranked you accordingly. Thankfully, they have become much better at discriminating between legit, human-edited and people-focused sites and these automated zombie-sites that are used as link factories and were never intended for human consumption.

The final (and most important) consideration is to do with your company’s image and reputation.

Even if the above risks didn’t exist and spamdexing schemes offered a failsafe way of improving your rankings, how comfortable would you be with having your brand and website associated with thousands of pages of junk, clogging up the web and offering nothing of value to anyone, least of all current or potential clients?

And most of all why take the gamble when, with a bit of creativity, you can find links you can be proud of, contribute something of value to the web, and grow your rankings the sustainable way?

Some *specific* uses of social media for travel marketing

July 10, 2011 No comments yet

By Matthew Barker

Last week I took part in a travel industry Question Time event, organized by the good people at Travel Mole. I was on the panel with various social media & advertising pros who (as you might expect) were universally positive about “social media” as a marketing tool and seemed to buy in to the idea that if you’re not “doing social,” you are missing out.

Also unsurprisingly, I had some contrarian opinions, and did my best to share them with the panel & audience.

My perspective was that social media is not a black box that is, by definition, some miraculous wonder tool that everyone simply has to be using.

I argued that for many small-to-medium travel businesses with limited budgets, priorities have to lie elsewhere in areas that are proven to offer a higher Return on Investment than most of the major social media platforms.

Interestingly, I was the only panel member who had experience of working in marketing for travel businesses, and when I challenged the panel to stop talking about “doing social” and start talking about specific applications that small to medium travel businesses could use we didn’t get too many suggestions, so here are a few from me:

“Old school” social has higher returns

It’s a shame that when we say social, these days people tend to think about Facebook, Twitter and soon Google+. The fact is that the actual traffic that these platforms deliver, unless generated by a particular campaign (more on that later), is untargeted, low quality and rarely translates into valuable leads.

On the other hand, there is an old school platform that existed before anyone invented the name social media: travel discussion forums. The web is awash with discussion forums and travellers actively seeking advice on upcoming travel experiences. The most popular are places like TripAdvisor and the forums of the major travel guides (Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, Fodors, etc).

Travel businesses who take an active role in these communities will be rewarded with more brand awareness, traffic and leads. The key is to see you role as just another community member. You’re not there to self promote, simply use your expertise to answer questions & offer advice. Don’t link back to itineraries and don’t mention your own products. Instead, use your company name in your username and add your URL to your signature.

As time goes by you can use your web analytics tool to check conversion rates from this traffic. I guarantee it will be significantly higher than your Facebook traffic. Why? Because people are actively looking for travel advice and not just wasting time catching up with their friends & gossip as is often the case on other social platforms.

Thinking in terms of catching purchase intent traffic, travel forums are significantly more valuable places to spend your limited time.

Promotions & deals

The one exception to this rule is when we use the more mainstream platforms to drive awareness of promotions and deals. The advantage here is the huge potential traffic and the ability to target connections down to very specific groups of people.

But what you absolutely cannot do is just post your deal to your Facebook wall and hope for the best. Because of the platform’s “EdgeRank” algorithm, chances are that your posts will not be seen by the vast majority of your followers, and even those that are will be rarely shared by your followers. A more proactive approach is required:

Invest in some creative art a Facebook landing page dedicated to your promotion. You can set this landing page as the default tab for new visitors to your page. Landing pages can be fairly advanced and include call to action buttons, contact forms, links to your site or downloads, etc. You will need a web developer to help you with this, if you have limited knowledge of web design.

Secondly, create a “fan gate”, i.e. require visitors to “Like” your page before they can register for the promotion. This is your pay-off for offering the deal and it means you can connect with new followers people for future use.

Finally, thanks to EdgeRank, you will need to invest in some targeted ads to generate any meaningful traffic. This is probably deliberate on Facebook’s part as their PPC ads are what brings them their income. Remember to target your ads as precisely as possible and continually monitor and optimize the campaign as it progresses.

Used in this way, a Facebook campaign can be very effective. We recently posted on how to use Twitter in a similar way. Please contact us if you’d like more help with setting up a campaign.

Integration & rankings

The last suggestion does not concern using social as a tool for broadcasting or interaction. The real strength of the platforms is when you start looking at ideas for integration using API keys (some knowledge of programming required). I recently wrote about using Facebook’s Like and Google’s +1 to integrate your pages with social platforms, but you can also do some pretty powerful things such as use Facebook as your authentication tool on contact forms to auto pull details and connections, and use Facebook profiles on your own site to customize the content that people see, depending on their interests.

Again, please contact us if you would like to know more about how this works.

So there are three specific uses of social media for travel marketing. And please, next time you hear anyone talking about “doing social” don’t be shy to interrupt and ask them exactly what they’re suggesting!


Reach us now:

Aly Mahan
aly@hitriddle.com
720.608.0336 (US)
skype: aly.hitriddle


Matthew Barker
matt@hitriddle.com
(+44) 7749462717 (UK)
skype: matt.hitriddle

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