Planning a local weekend getaway or a global itinerary, compelling travel content connects emotionally and drives action.If you’re not on board at this point, there’s probably no hope. Or you’ve mastered a marketing strategy that the rest of us haven’t, and are managing just fine without any social media for your travel business.
(Feel free to share your secrets).
For the rest of us, posting content on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X is an essential part of maintaining a presence online, engaging your customers and reaching new potential travellers. And the key to success with travel social media is sharing posts regularly across multiple platforms.
1. ‘This Or That’
A simple style of social media post that can help to create engagement would be to ask your audience a ‘this or that’ question. This is a great option for brands sharing travel content, as it’s easy to select two of your target destinations, accommodation types or holiday activities and get your audience’s feedback on what they prefer.
A ‘this or that’ post works well as a Facebook or Instagram post encouraging followers to comment or react to cast their vote, and can also work as the topic of a short TikTok video. But you can also make use of the ‘poll’ feature on Instagram stories and allow your audience to engage with your content in a single click, which is great for boosting the reach and performance of your profile.
A bonus of this idea for travel social media is that you can also collect data on your target audience’s preferences, and use this to inform your offering in the future.
2. Talk About the Weather
The weather is a topic that always gets people talking. Whether the UK is experiencing a heatwave, weathering a storm or the first snowfall of the year has been forecast, try and hop on discussion and general sentiment with a comment or comparison about the weather in your target destination. A photo or video of the conditions, especially with a caption promising a better alternative to the weather where your followers currently are, can have a very positive impact on bookings.
3. Landmark Quizzes
A great way to show off landmarks in your destination or near your hotels and resorts is by asking your audience to identify where a photo or video has been taken. Again, you can encourage interaction through leaving comments, or make use of the interactive features available on Instagram stories and add a submissions box for your followers to post their answers.
Remember to respond after a while to reveal the answer and congratulate those first few who guessed right!
4. Share Customer Content
A classic approach in travel social media marketing is to make use of user-generated content (UGC). With their permission, sharing photos and videos of holidaymakers enjoying themselves on your brand’s Instagram is a great way to build trust with potential holiday-goers.
You’ll likely have a collection of official photos of your offering that can be used for social media content, but mixing this up with images taken by customers helps to give a more authentic feel to your accounts. After all, if a customer wants to document their trip themselves, they’re clearly having a good time!
Working with influencers is one method of gathering user-generated content, but you should also encourage all of your customers to make and share social media posts and tag or mention your brand. This can be incentivised by offering rewards to customers who participate, such as entering them in giveaways or offering a discounted second trip.
Get users to use a branded hashtag on their content, or just encourage them to tag your account directly. The latter is also an excellent way to help improve overall engagement for your accounts and increase your reach, especially on Instagram.
5. Share Local Events and Festivals
There are a lot of events and festivals that occur around the world and whilst some are mainstream and well-known to travellers, there are many that aren’t. A great travel content idea for social media is to highlight your specialist knowledge of an area and share a post talking about local events, festivals or celebrations that travellers can enjoy as part of their trip.
You can use any format of social media post across different channels for this idea, from a slideshow of infographics to a vlog showing what an event is really like. Share these with your audiences and create awareness of all your destinations have to offer and the vibrant activities going on there.
If you’re struggling to condense all of the key information about an event into a single post or short video, why not write a long piece of blog content about all the events taking place in a month or a season in your chosen destination, and direct your followers to read this for more information? And speaking of blogs…
6. Promote Your Blog
Sharing a link to your blog and blog posts is a good way to drive traffic to your website from your social media accounts, and make your followers aware that there’s more content available online. Whenever you update your blog with new posts you should be sharing it on your social media accounts to draw attention to them, as well as sharing these links in your email newsletter.
When it comes to how to promote your blog posts, a tried and tested approach in social media for travel brands is to repurpose the content in your blog post to write a caption and/or feature a quote in an infographic. Give the reader a snippet of what’s in store, and then send them to the full piece with a link.
If you’re not sure what to write for your travel blog, check out our epic list of over one hundred travel blog post ideas…
7. Interact With Your Audience
This isn’t necessarily a content idea, but it is an important part of social media and travel that you need to keep on top of if you’re running an account for your company. If your followers are interacting with your social media content (and you should be doing everything you can to ensure that they are) then you need to engage with these interactions as much as possible to establish your online presence and help to build a sense of relationships with potential customers.
Reply to comments quickly, especially if they’re asking a question or sharing feedback about your offering, as this demonstrates to other potential customers that you care about your followers and take time to listen and interact with them. Reposting content that mentions your brand, or even just liking it, also encourages your followers to continue tagging you and again create a sense of online presence that is great for your brand image.
Many of the travel content ideas for social media encourage interaction, so make sure that your strategy includes plenty of posts that will maximise engagement.
8. Promote Your Offers
Social media is a great place to share your latest offers and deals. Whether this is a seasonal sale or a special discount for certain customers, these should be promoted across all of your social media channels to maximise the chances of people making a booking that uses the discount or deal.
Bear in mind that studies have shown that it’s best to keep to a 9:1 ratio of great content to promotional posts, so make sure you don’t overdo it with the offers and turn off your audience! Make sure to create unique content for each platform as well – the last thing you want is followers getting bored of seeing the same text and graphics on multiple channels and then not making a booking at all.
9. Share Testimonials and Reviews
Social media is a fantastic platform for sharing social proof, and testimonials or reviews are one of the best ways to do this. A classic approach is just sharing quotes from customers who have enjoyed their holiday, but you can also get more creative and create videos or incorporate spoken reviews into visual content so that this proof is more engaging.
Reviews are most effective when they’re believable, which is why it’s great to pair a review with a real photo of the customer. If you can find willing participants, a travel social media marketing strategy that can have a fantastic impact is filming reviews whilst your customers are on holiday, and then sharing these on TikTok and Instagram. You can then repurpose the content and take quotes from the transcript of these videos, so you have written reviews that can be posted on your website as well.
10. Promote Local Businesses
Holidaymakers are always looking for good places to visit on their travels, and plenty of people now turn to social media to look for travel recommendations instead of ‘old-fashioned’ avenues like guidebooks or a simple Google. A whopping 75% of travellers turn to apps like Instagram, TikTok and even Pinterest to seek inspiration when they’re planning a trip.
A great idea for travel content on your socials is to let potential holidaymakers know about restaurants, cafes and shops that are off the beaten track that you love. You can help both inform your guests but also bolster your relationship with businesses in your local area, which might lead to partnerships later down the line.
Not only is this idea a great way to share more unique content with your followers, but by offering personal recommendations and championing local businesses, you position yourself as an expert who really knows your destination. So not only will your content be genuinely helpful, but it makes your brand look good as well.
12. Share Links to Relevant News
A lot of social media for travel focuses on creating new content, but your strategy should also involve sharing and interacting with content that is already online and relevant to your brand and your audience. One way you can do this is by sharing links to relevant news on platforms like X or Instagram that talk about your target destination(s) or share information that might be useful to travellers who are visiting soon.
Sharing local news from trustworthy websites, such as a local or regional paper can help build relationships within your local community. Sharing relevant, national news as well is a good way to get conversations started and provides useful information for your fans which isn’t promotional in any way.
You can also use this approach to hop on trends that are relevant to your brand’s offering and/or destination. If large authoritative websites are talking positively about places your company visits, for example, then there’s no doubt that it will be persuasive for readers who are considering a trip there.
13. Share Links to Relevant Blog Posts (On Other Blogs)
A quick and simple way to build relationships with travel bloggers, local organisations and businesses and inform your audience about upcoming events is to share blog posts that other people have written on your social media channels. As in the example above, third-party recommendations for places you offer can help to inspire potential customers to make a booking.
Interacting with other social media accounts and influencers is also a good way to establish relationships or partnerships where your content will also get shared by them. The world of travel social media is pretty large now, so no matter what your brand’s niche is, you’ll likely be able to find other accounts sharing relevant content that your audience will also enjoy.
14. Give a Shout Out for a Specific Account You Love
Do you have a favourite travel influencer? Or know of an influencer who loves to create content about your destination? Engaging with bloggers and blogs that you, your brand and your audience will resonate with is a great way to build a relationship with the blogger, and potentially gain some exposure as well as share useful recipes, news, reviews, itineraries etc with your audience.
Turn this into a regular series, like promoting a different account on the same day every week or letting them ‘take over’ your account for a day. It can have a hugely beneficial effect on your own visibility as people develop a relationship with your brand and influencers become more likely to interact with you and mention you on various platforms.
16. Partner With Other Accounts
We’ve already mentioned partnerships a couple of times in this article, but when it comes to social media for travel, it’s a classic strategy. Partnering with other businesses and promoting this on social media is a great way to build your audience, and relationships, and gain exposure.
Local companies such as tour operators, day trip organisers and restaurants are good accounts to target. Every partnership will be unique depending on your mutual business goals, but it might be that you offer your customers deals across both brands or just share each other’s content recommending and endorsing what’s on offer.
You should look to find a business of a similar audience size that is a good fit with yours so both parties get a good deal and both benefit from the increased visibility of the other’s audience. The more established the brand that you partner with, the more their followers are going to trust that you’re also a good brand to engage with.
17. Fill in the Blank Posts
Our final travel content idea for social media is a fun one that can help boost engagement with your posts. Simply ask your audience a ‘fill in the blank’ question, such as getting suggestions for a favourite destination or holiday activity, and then engage with the comments and share the results.
These posts are great for engagement as well as conducting subtle market research. You can also use their answers to influence future posts, if you find a lot of people reply with the same answer you can look to tailor a future post or even an aspect of your brand offering around this answer.
Planning Your Content
So you’ve got lots of great ideas for posts, what now?
Developing a social media content calendar will help you organise the way you curate and distribute your content, as well as keep a record of what you’ve posted so you can plan ahead and develop your strategy.
Being organised in this way will also save you time in the long run and helps you manage your time. Your calendar can also be used to incorporate other social media channels and your blog.
We recommend planning all of your content a month at a time. You can take a list of ideas, like the one we’ve shared here, and simply assign an idea to each day or alternating days of the month, and pretty quickly you’ll have a plan for all of the content you need to create.
Once you’ve decided what you’re going to be adding to your profiles, you need to make sure you post it in the most effective way to gain as much reach as possible. Different platforms have different peak times and guidance for how to get a post to perform as well as possible, and it’s important to research this to give your content the best chance possible.
You should also measure and track the performance of your social media posts to highlight what does particularly well, such as types of content, tones of caption, and even the time of day that you post. This data can be incredibly valuable for refining your strategy over time and developing an approach to travel social media marketing that delivers consistently good results.
Scheduling Posts
Most platforms provide the option for you to schedule your posts, which means that after you’ve drawn up your plan for the week or month, you can sit down and spend 10-15 minutes scheduling your posts.
This is a useful tool, especially for weekend posts or if you are going to be out of the office/unable to post things on a particular day.
Finding the balance between annoying and informative can be difficult. Whilst you want to share everything going on you don’t want to bombard your audience with so many updates that they ‘switch off’ to what your brand has to say and at worst, unfollow your page. So keep your content consistent, but don’t go overboard.
Summary
So there you have it!
With 15 minutes to schedule all your posts, and around 45 minutes to decide what you plan to post, it is possible to keep your social media accounts updated using up no more than 1 hour per week. However, the more time and effort you put into this content, the greater the response and impact there will be. And once you get into the swing of things it will become a doddle!
If you keep this kind of strategy up consistently then over time you will accumulate a good increase in your following and form a good foundation for when you wish to invest a bit more time and effort into your social media campaigns.
If you’re looking for support and suggestions for your travel social media strategy, whether that’s organic or paid social, our team can help. Find out more about our social media marketing services, or get in touch to speak to us about what you’re looking for.
