Social media

Social media is a funny thing. It’s free and easy to use. It can help you reach millions of potential customers. But when most people talk about it, they mention negatives!

Yes! it can be useful for business and marketing but…

It takes up so much time. It’s hard to know if it’s really working. It’s hard to come up with ideas. It’s hard to keep up. All of these things can be true. They’re also relatively easy to solve. Sometimes, the problem isn’t the one we think.

There are a few mistakes eve…

Have you tried letting your visitors do your marketing for you? 

The 'normal' ways to do this is through word of mouth recommendations. I'm suggesting going a step further with four different ways to encourage your visitors to help promote your business - without being pushy.

First of all, you can encourage word of mouth recommendations through social media, simply by suggesting people follow you or asking happy customers to post photos of their visit. 

The second way is to think about offeri…

When you write a social media post, are you an expert sprinkler of #hashtags or are you still mystified by the random-seeming words after the # sign?

It doesn’t help that each social media channel uses hashtags in different ways. And that some guidelines and algorithms have also recently changed. Here’s a quick overview.

First of all, what are hashtags?

They’re the short words or phrases that follow the #, that help perform the sorting process to decide which posts get seen, and when. Not all…

When your marketing budget is limited, there's an easy way to add power to your promotions: piggyback. Piggyback marketing essentially means using someone else's marketing budget to benefit your business. 

Obviously I don't mean actually using their money, but rather harnessing the power of their activity and piggybacking on the awareness they're able to create. It's a bit like riding in the slipstream of a more powerful vehicle. 

Read on for some ideas for current trends you can easily piggyb…

I'm not very musical but every now and then a song gets stuck in my head. For some reason I've got Bob Marley's words singing in my head: let's get together and feel all right. 

It really does feel like it's time for us all to work together. Tourism can be affected by so many different factors (Floods, Brexit, Coronavirus) which we can't control. We can however make everything feel better.

Community. Collaboration. Kindness. None of them cost anything, yet they have enormous power. Visitors lo…

You might have noticed on social media and in the press that it's Something Day or Week almost every day? Whether it's Dry January, Black Friday or Take Your Pet to Work Day, there's always an 'awareness day' with a hashtag trying to grab attention.

You might have even tried to use one of these hashtags to give your own social media a boost? I've put together a few ideas to help you use awareness days more successfully. 

First things first.

What are 'awareness days'?

For decades we've used …

Instagram has recently made two changes which are likely to make a big difference to users.

Firstly, you can now log in to your account and post to Instagram directly from your computer so Instagram is no-longer mobile-only.

The second change is that now everyone can add links in Stories. This used to be something only available on verified accounts or those with a given number of followers but is now being rolled out everywhere.

To add links to your Stories, you need to use the Link sticker …

I love twitter for the variety of topics  on there and the many useful links I often find, but I rarely suggest businesses use it to promote their businesses. Whenever I look at Google Analytics for tourism business websites, twitter seems to refer very little business.

Twitter is brilliant for one thing though: generating free media coverage.

Journalists love twitter. They use it to gather stories, spot trends, find new contacts and – most importantly and useful for you – to ask for informati…