As we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words.
When it comes to leisure travel, the importance of “inspiration” is widely underestimated by travellers: in a presentation from Tom von Gessel of Google (Travel Industry Lead) about a recent study* – he shares that leisure travellers rank “inspirational content” as 23rd out of 35 experience elements in decision-making for booking a trip, but behavioural data shows that the “inspiration” element actually ranks 7th out of 35. This reinforces the power of sharing content that wows our audience on our social media channels – which is where you, our Members come in!
While there are a lot of beautiful photos and videos that come from our visitors, you as our Industry partners also have inspiring content that we can amplify on our social channels.
We currently use a crowd-sourcing platform called Crowdriff to ask for permission to repost social content that others have created (mostly on Instagram) by asking the account that posted the photo/video to comment with the hashtag #yesTofino. Once approved with the hashtag, these photos or videos then get imported into a database in the Crowdriff platform that can easily be added to our content schedule. This eliminates any back-and-forth emails for access to these assets.
Although it does feel impersonal to comment on your posts with a hashtag request, this is currently the most streamlined tool we have in our toolbox, and it works well!
How does this benefit you?
It helps us increase traffic to your social pages! We give credit to the content source, which means that this is another place for your potential guests to discover you. Our Instagram page currently has 101,000 followers, and in the past two weeks, our organic posts (static images and Reels) have had an average of 13,821 impressions (or views).
Sharing content with Tourism Tofino helps to promote visitors to our region, and to your business.
If you have any questions, please reach out to our Content Coordinator, Jess, at jessica@tourismtofino.com
*The Expectations of the Evolving Traveler 2022, conducted by KANTAR