Editors pics! These platforms provide strong opportunities in both traffic, SEO authority and relevance for anyone with a stand-alone travel brand looking to increase visibility and “shareability” online. Get found @:
Leveraging the visual-web explosion now fully underway, Pinterest is a must-be-in platform for anyone with great imagery and offers travel brands and destinations a creative, virtual canvas to showcase their experiential and visual treasures. The ability to creatively theme boards in inspirational ways and cross-index travel product in different ways across boards together with the rapid growth in Pinterest users (especially women), makes this site a hot opportunity for travel brands. Also, Pinterest is a great place to market your contests, infograhics and special offers via images which can get re-pinned…BONUS!
- Trip Advisor
Still the go-to site for consumer reviews in the travel space, established trust factor and well trafficked. Let’s see… 75 million customer reviews, 56 mm unique visitors per month and 32 million user accounts (up from 20 million last year). While some may complain about unverified reviews and older reviews, your job is to incent your customers to make this a non-issue in your particular case. Trip Advisor’s recent shift to focus on higher quality traffic which converts better for their advertisers will be a real win for them if they are correct in betting on social media over PPC as a source of new visitors. And, as an inbound link, Trip Advisor has the domain authority travel sites need for SEO. Then, grabbing great review content to cross-merchandise on your social platforms can’t really hurt, now can it? And as search ranking gets more influenced by social interaction…well, quadruple whammy!
- Vimeo, Vine and YouTube
When video views are growing in leaps and bounds across the online universe…why limit your video platforms to one when you can have two or even three (ever tried Socialcam?). Video offers travel businesses the holy grail in highly consumed/desired content, the ultimate visual merchandising for destinations, a “more real = more relevant” medium and the opportunity to use voiceovers for added messaging benefits and personalization. If you haven’t developed your video playlist, what’s stopping you?
- Word Press Blogs
Feeling a little intimidated about becoming a blogger? Relax, you’ve got the inside track on your trip product and destination which now you can share regularly via your blog to a self-selected audience just fascinated about learning more. Check out these top travel blogs combining insightful tips, videos and destination highlights. Google’s algorithm will eat up all that fresh content you post and the social stratosphere will share, share, share the wealth. And don’t forget to link to other blogs and comment on other blogs. It’s all about being helpful, active and influential. And why Word Press? Well for SEO value it beats out other blog networks like Blogger, Blogspot and Tumbler. Yep, it’s that simple.
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite is simply invaluable to help you schedule and automate your social media posts across networks. Not only that, but Hootsuite’s extensive analytics show you which links are getting the most clicks. The Hootlet plugin is great for tagging and sharing curated content you discover elsewhere and you can simplify your world by creating tabs for your personal and professional streams of social media content in a “one stop shopping” daily destination for all things social. And did I mention? The base model is FREE. We like that.
Got your own favorite travel-apps and sites? Tell us about them!
