You may have noticed a new gallery of visual stories pop up on our homepage, as well as similar galleries on the Destination British Columbia and Tourism Vancouver Island websites. Since July, Tourism Tofino has been participating in a Destination British Columbia pilot project with other invited DMOs in an effort to have a shared approach to content creation and distribution across various platforms, expanding our reach to target traveller markets. The benefit for Tofino is that our visibility to users of HelloBC.com and TVI’s website has been greatly enhanced – and an airline partner will soon be displaying these visual stories as well!
To date, we have produced 20 Google AMP stories (accelerated mobile pages) on a variety of Tofino topics, including rainforest trails, ways of playing in the rain, how to storm watch and local shops. These stories, comparable to Instagram/Facebook stories, are in portrait format but live online in perpetuity, versus the limited, 24-hour lifespan of the former. They also “load up” quicker on mobile devices. You should soon be able to see these stories on our social channels, mainly Instagram and Facebook. As this is a new way of producing digital stories, there are many questions without answers as of yet. The best way to see the collection of stories we’ve produced is to refresh our website and watch the change in the visual stories gallery on the homepage.
We’ll have more news about the pilot project once it is announced by Destination British Columbia in November, but wanted to give you an update on what we’ve been up to digitally.
