Social Media for Travel: What Actually Works

Travel is the category where social media matters most and is executed worst. The traveler community is one of the most active on Twitter, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Pinterest. Every trip generates content — photos, reviews, itineraries, recommendations. Every recommendation generates a booking decision downstream. And yet a majority of small and mid-sized travel and hospitality operators still run social media as a checkbox exercise rather than as a demand channel.

Why Travel Is the Category Social Media Was Built For

Four structural reasons social works harder for travel than for almost any other category.

The purchase is high-consideration and research-driven. Nobody books a $4,000 family vacation on impulse. Travelers spend weeks reading reviews, comparing itineraries, and asking friends. Social media is where that research now happens.

The product is inherently visual. A hotel room, a beach, a dining terrace, a street market — the product photographs itself. Instagram, launched in October 2010, has surfaced this fact for the entire travel industry inside 18 months.

The customer is a content producer. Every traveler is a photographer, reviewer, and recommender. TripAdvisor's review corpus, Foursquare tips, Facebook check-ins, and Twitter travel accounts have collectively built the largest user-generated travel research library in history — at zero cost to the platforms hosting it.

The recommendation cycle is peer-to-peer. The single most reliable predictor of a travel booking is a recommendation from a friend or a trusted online voice. Social platforms compress that recommendation loop from months (the returned-home dinner conversation) to real time (the Instagram photo posted from the pool deck).

What the Platforms Look Like for Travel in 2012

Facebook is the primary community-building layer — Fan Pages for individual properties, brand accounts for chains, active engagement with returning customers and prospects considering a booking. The most-used platform for organized travel marketing programs.

Twitter is the customer-service and real-time-response layer. Delta, JetBlue, Virgin America, and the best-run hotel brands treat their Twitter accounts as a live customer-support line. The response time on Twitter has become a diagnostic of whether the brand is actually running social or just posting on it.

TripAdvisor — founded 2000, now the dominant traveler-review platform globally — is not "social media" in the platform-first sense, but it functions as one in traveler behavior. A property's TripAdvisor rating is the single biggest social signal in the category. Ignoring it is not an option.

Pinterest, still in early growth in 2012, has emerged as the visual planning layer — travelers pinning destinations, hotels, and itineraries into curated boards weeks or months before they book. Travel brands producing pinnable visual content are seeing engagement rates that outperform most other verticals.

Foursquare, at 20 million users, is the check-in and local-recommendation layer. Hotel and restaurant tips, mayoral rewards for frequent guests, and destination check-ins that carry into a traveler's Facebook feed downstream.

Instagram, less than two years old, has grown into the destination-imagery layer at a pace no travel brand can afford to ignore. The hashtag search on any destination pulls thousands of images travelers are already producing — a real-time destination portfolio the property does not have to fund.

The Programs That Actually Work

Three consistent patterns across the travel brands running measurable social programs.

Give the traveler a mechanic. Marriott, Fairmont, and Kimpton have run photo contests, itinerary-sharing campaigns, and hashtag programs that hand the customer a reason to post about the stay. The mechanic converts a passive guest into a visible advocate. The content produced belongs to the brand at no incremental cost.

Reply. Actually reply. Every guest complaint answered on Twitter inside two hours produces a public artifact of the brand's responsiveness that dozens of other prospective guests will see. Every complaint left unanswered produces the opposite artifact. The economics of the choice are one-sided.

Feed the visual layer. A property that produces one high-quality photo a week — the pool at golden hour, the breakfast spread, the view from the balcony — builds a compounding image library that shows up in Instagram searches, Pinterest boards, and Facebook Page previews for years. Photography is not marketing overhead. It is the inventory.

What Small and Mid-Sized Travel Operators Get Wrong

Four consistent failures across small and mid-sized travel operators.

Posting without engaging — treating Facebook as a bulletin board and never replying to the comments. Broadcast, not conversation.

Ignoring TripAdvisor — leaving negative reviews unanswered, letting the traveler tell the story without pushback, and failing to claim the listing at all. TripAdvisor lets the operator reply to every review. Most operators do not.

Underfunding photography — a smartphone photo posted in bad lighting is not free. It is expensive, because it lowers the perceived quality of the property to every prospective guest who sees it. One professional photo shoot per property amortizes across five years of social content.

No mechanic — running social with no reason for the customer to participate. Pure broadcasting produces low engagement, and low engagement is the metric platforms use to decide how many people see the next post. The account decays.

What Comes Next for Travel Social

Three directions worth watching over the next 18 months.

Instagram will become the dominant destination-marketing layer for the next decade. Every travel brand needs an Instagram operating discipline now, not later.

TripAdvisor's reach into booking — via Business Listings and property responses — will keep expanding. The gap between properties that manage the platform and properties that ignore it will widen.

Real-time customer service on Twitter will migrate from "innovative" to "table stakes." Brands that cannot respond inside two hours will lose share to brands that can.

Travel is one of the categories where the social channel is not adjacent to the business. It is the business. The operators who treat it that way will out-book the ones who don't.

Related coverage: Travel & Hospitality · Social Media · Marketing · Public Relations · Digital Marketing.