7 Social Media Marketing Mistakes Travel Businesses Should Avoid

Social media marketing is a crucial element when it comes to promoting your tours, travel packages, and your brand in general. Using beautiful images of faraway places and fascinating sights, you can inspire wanderlust and stir the travel bug in people.

But, it’s not as simple as posting a few nice pictures and calling it a day. You need to have a good social media marketing strategy in place. A comprehensive strategy will allow you to engage and communicate better with your target audience. In turn, this will help drive people to make a booking with your travel company.

If you truly want to see success from your efforts to promote your travel products, then here are some common social media marketing mistakes to avoid.

Social Media Marketing Mistakes To Avoid

1. Posting The Same Content On All Social Platforms

While consistency is important, you don’t want to be posting the same content on each of your social platforms. Each has its own purpose and style that you need to focus on.

Travelers access different platforms for different reasons. For example, they might search on Instagram for inspiration, Facebook for the latest travel deals, and Twitter for important travel updates or announcements. When you share content, it’s therefore important to take this into account and put the right message on each profile where it will suit the context of usage.

It’s also likely your followers will follow you on more than one of your social platforms. So, it makes sense that they wouldn’t want to see the same piece of content multiple times. Rather engage them where it’s most relevant.

This will have the advantage of giving each social media profile for your travel business an original touch. Your audience will come to know that they can expect to see unique and engaging content on the platform where it matters most.

2. Not Having A Dedicated Person Or Team Handling The Social Channels

Promoting your travel business through social media is an essential marketing tactic. But, one of the common social media marketing mistakes travel businesses make is to post eye-catching images and hope that will do the trick!

It’s important to have a dedicated social media marketing person or team to plan out your social campaigns, monitor the analytics, and evaluate and adapt your strategy. This will help you to see the best results.

If your travel business is just starting out, one person might be able to handle this. But, for businesses that already have quite a following, you’ll most likely need a team of people to handle the different aspects of social media marketing.

This includes team members for planning and strategizing, photographing and editing images, writing the posts, as well as monitoring the channels to respond to any questions that people leave on your posts.

3. Sharing Unexciting Content

With so many businesses vying for the attention of your target audience on social platforms, it’s vital that you stand out from the crowd.

Regularly posting pictures, details, and the occasional discount code is all well and good. But these tactics aren’t going to keep your audience interested in the long run. It’s important to post original content with relatable, and even humorous, concepts for people to enjoy.

Posting fun, exciting content is sure to help you keep your target audience more interested in your brand. This way, they’ll be more likely to book one of your tours or packages when they’re ready to go on an adventure!

4. Not Examining Analytics

Every social media platform provides analytics for business pages or profiles. These are often ignored - which is a big mistake!

It’s important to look beyond the number of likes and comments and examine the performance of your posts as well as your page as a whole. Analytical reports also give you an idea of your engagement with your target audience.

Assessing your analytics can give you deeper insights into trends and what types of posts your audience responds best to. This allows you to update your social media strategy so that you can improve engagement and, ultimately, see more conversions for your travel business.

5. Not Using Stories

Using the Stories or Live feature on platforms like Instagram and Facebook is a great way to post more authentic, real-life content. While your posts should be well-polished, your Stories can show your audience a completely different side to your travel business.

You can use this feature to give more information, repost images your brand is tagged in, and show your audience a more in-depth look into what you can offer them. People also tend to pay more attention to videos. So, posting quick video snippets is a great tactic to employ.

6. Not Responding To Your Audience

Responding to your audience is one of the best ways to show them that you value their thoughts, comments, and questions. If someone posts a comment and you don’t respond, they’ll most likely head over to one of your competitors to see if they will help, causing you to lose out on their business unnecessarily.

It’s, therefore, important to have someone on your team at the ready to provide answers to potential clients and respond to their comments. This interaction with your audience will result in people having a more positive experience with your travel brand.

7. Blocking Users

When you see harsh criticism, it’s easy to respond to the negativity by deleting the comment or blocking the person. However, this is not the way to do things and is one of the social media marketing mistakes to avoid.

It’s important to let people speak their opinions and share their experiences. Respond to them and try to resolve the issue instead of blocking them. Sometimes this means making certain changes within your business. Then, you can let your audience know that you’ve worked to improve your service for them.

This type of honesty shows that you value your customer’s opinions and are doing your best to give them an enjoyable experience. On the other hand, by blocking users and deleting comments, it makes it seem like you are unwilling to engage should any potential issues arise.

The Bottom Line

Because there is so much competition in the travel industry, it’s essential that you put time and effort into using your social channels wisely, avoiding some of the common social media marketing mistakes which can lead to disengaged followers or even a damaged reputation for your business.