5 Steps to Build Your Destination’s Brand on Social Media

No matter which social media platforms your destination prioritizes, a social media strategy is essential to guide your content. There are too many possibilities and pitfalls to leave it to chance. Having a playbook for your marketing team to lay out what you’ll be doing on which channel helps ensure your destination connects with the right audiences without diluting the brand. Consistency and focus are key.

Before writing a social media strategy, a destination marketing organization (DMO) should conduct an audit of existing content to understand past performance. Additionally, analyze key competitors (either other states or metros) and aspirational accounts (such as regional partners) so that you know what’s working and what could use room for improvement. Research is your best friend when conducting a social media audit before the strategy.

Then, it’s time to draft a clear strategy that everyone on your destination’s marketing team can understand.

1. Identify Audiences

Understanding who is at the other end of your destination’s messaging is vital to any social media strategy. As part of the audit, review the demographics of your current followers. See how it aligns with – or where there may be a gap – in the visitors you want to reach (Gen Z budget travelers? Families? Couples looking for luxury?). From there, prioritize channels they’re most active on. It’s better to be active on fewer channels that you have the bandwidth to manage, than dormant because you have too many.

2. Optimize Social Keywords

A strong destination social media strategy goes beyond content pillars. It’s important to ensure that all of the content your destination is publishing is optimized and recognizable by search engines. While brand and event/campaign hashtags remain useful, generic hashtags such as #travel and #vacation are no longer as important to increase visibility, based on insight from the Head of Instagram himself. Social media algorithms are getting more sophisticated, so any keywords within the copy of your caption or alt text will be used to identify what your post is about (similar to SEO across the rest of the web), regardless of using a hashtag.

3. Define Your Destination’s Voice

Posting consistently is a key piece of any destination’s social media strategy. It helps keep your destination top of mind across the vacation planning process (or marketing funnel) from awareness to booking. One way to stay consistent is to make sure you aren’t reinventing your destination’s voice for every social media post. Decide if you’re going to use the same voice across social media channels or if you’re going to be more informative on some channels and more casual and quirky on others. Get down to the nitty gritty including what emojis your destination will use most frequently.

Something that seems routine, may require extra finesse to ensure your team is always posting in the same voice. Your social media channels are an extension of your brand, so it’s important that all posts appear cohesive, regardless of who creates them. A well-defined social media strategy ensures your destination’s tone remains consistent and recognizable.

4. Plan for Community Management

Anyone who has managed a destination social media page understands the rabbit hole of comments that awaits. An effective social media strategy will help streamline things, by using a decision tree to outline what types of comments you will reply to and how often, as well as what pages you’ll monitor, to engage with as your destination. 

It’s key to remember the “social” part of social media – it’s a two-way street. Destinations shouldn’t only self promote with their own content, but engage with others – especially visitors, locals and partners. A pre-curated response bank can help have responses on hand for a variety of FAQs or compliments (such as ‘I love [destination]!’) so that you’re never scrambling and time can be better spent on custom, ad-hoc responses when needed.

5. Define KPIs

While every DMO leader wants their content to go viral whether or not they say so, a social media strategy establishes more realistic and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs). Identify your organization’s priority metrics to indicate success, regardless of how many data points you’re tracking. Followers can be a vanity metric depending on the context, so it’s often more important to focus on who is saving and sharing your content on social media (indicating individual trip interest or between friends and family). Of course, tracking more traditional engagements such as likes and comments are also important beyond the bigger impressions. Together, all data helps tell a story, but it’s up to your DMO to decide which metric is the North Star for success. 

Interested in revamping your destination’s social media presence? Get in touch with Hanna Gbordzoe at hanna.gbordzoe@aboutdci.com to learn more about partnering with DCI’s social media specialists.