Facebook for tourist boards – eight rules

It’s a standard requirement now, as a marketing organisation, any tourist board, DMO or CVB should have a Facebook page. We’ve created quite a few for clients now, to varying degrees of success (probably the most successful being New Mexico’s) and so I’ve had a look at the differentiators affecting this.

I’ve come up with a few rules, they’re not hard and fast guarantees for millions of fans, but they are a good start.

Page, not profile or group

Profiles are for individuals, groups are for causes or personal interaction (like the alumni of a University wanting to stay in touch with each other) and pages are for brands or organisations. As a tourist board is an organisation promoting a destination’s brand, you want a page.

When pages were first introduced to Facebook there was an argument for sticking with a group or a profile page, as they leant themselves more to interaction, and people’s activities as profiles or in groups appeared in their friend’s news feeds – increasing visibility and creating an avenue for viral growth. I’ll talk a bit more about this later, but rest assured it is not the case anymore. Thanks to the changes Facebook has made for it’s many big money advertisers who have pages, they are now by far the best way to promote a brand.

To anyone who thought this point was a given, well there are still several tourist boards who really get this wrong.

Make it official, but not too official

You’re a fan (in real life) of Chelsea Football Club*. So you search Facebook for ‘Chelsea’ and get two pages in the results – ‘Chelsea FC ‘and ‘The Chelsea FC Marketing Department’. Which one are you going to pledge allegiance too?

The same applies to a destination. People don’t love the organisation employed to promote (for example) Barcelona, they love Barcelona – the place. So don’t name your page ‘Barcelona Tourism’, either just name it ‘Barcelona’ (this is going to be better for appearing in searches) or give it a personal touch – like ‘I Love Barcelona’ or ‘The Barcelona Fan Page’.

People like to know a page is official, but there’s a difference between a page run by the tourist board and a page for the tourist board.

New York’s ‘I Love New York’ branding automatically lends itself to this – I wouldn’t be surprised if the tagline’s applicability to social media was considered when it was initially conceived.

Provide some helpful information and unique content

You’re not likely to gain fans without giving them a reason to come to your page, and even if you do manage thousands of fans without it, what would be the point? It would be like sending an email with no content out to a database of thousands.

Visit Germany do this well, they’ve got a flashy landing page with info, links to market specific pages, a brochure, contact info, an online game, video content (in the form of a YouTube tab), a map, events and links out to every other kind of information a traveller might want.

(Incidentally, Visit Germany’s page only has 1,250 fans at time of writing – compare that to this unofficial page – I suspect this is due to them not adhering to rule one.)

Engage, engage, engage

It’s that old adage of social media – engaging. The benefit of having a fan base on Facebook over an email database, is that it’s a two way form of communication.

Encourage your fans to communicate with you – start conversations in the discussions tab, ask them to upload photos and videos and ask questions in your status updates rather than just broadcasting news. You’ll find out what people really like about your destination, what they don’t, and you’ll get some great (and some maybe not so great) multimedia content. You’ll also probably learn a lot of things about your destination that you didn’t already know.

Facebook insights provides you not just with numbers and demographics for your fans, but levels of interaction – there’s a reason for that!

Update regularly

Make sure you engage and update regularly. Not too regularly, you don’t want to spam your fans as they’ll just unsubscribe, but the more chances you give them to interact the more likely your page is to grow, as their friends will see the activity in their news feeds and opt to become fans too.

Link to your page from your website’s home page

This might sound obvious if you’re not a web marketer (and may do even if you are), but many website owners are reluctant to actively direct their precious traffic to an outside site like Facebook, particularly traffic from the home page.

This is the wrong way of thinking about it. Don’t think of your Facebook page as separate to your website, it’s just an extension of your online presence. If anything your Facebook page is a preferable place for your audience to be – can you communicate with the visitors of your website? No. Well, not unless they email or call you, or you’ve got a forum section on your site.

Besides, what goes around comes around. If someone lands on your home page, instantly clicks out to your Facebook page and becomes a fan, they’re more likely to come back to your website another time when they see you post something interesting. I’ve seen several clients’ Google Analytics show Facebook among their top referrals.

Don’t let your PR/marketing agency do it all

This might sound like we want to shirk out of doing all the work, but that’s not the intention (honest!). Your agency might set you up a beautiful page, monitor everything said on it, advise what kind of content should go up and promote it like nobody’s business, but ideally the content should come from the horse’s mouth. Particularly if you’re in the destination you’re promoting and your agency are elsewhere.

People get put off if they think they’re not getting the genuine inside track, and you’ll probably get some very knowledgeable fans who’ll pick up on any information which isn’t 100% correct. So even if it is your agency is doing the updates, and they have great product knowledge, it’s preferable for the content to come from you.

Don’t localise

Again this sounds obvious, but some of the basic edicts of tourism marketing get forgotten when it comes to social media. As a tourism organisation, your first job is to convince people to come to your destination. Not to provide an information service to residents. So don’t update your page with information that is only going to be of interest to locals.

I’ve seen tourist board Facebook page status updates informing their fans which buses are in operation in the destination. Is this going to entice anyone to visit? No.

It’s inevitable that you’ll get fans who are residents of your destination – they can be really helpful, often answering queries from potential visitors and doing your job for you – but always remember they are not your intended audience. Before you post anything, first think ‘is this going to be of interest to a potential visitor?’ If the answer is no, then don’t post.

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Anyone got any more guidelines for tourist boards on Facebook?

What’s your favourite tourist board Facebook page? Who gets all (or most) of this right? Who gets it wrong, and why?

*Disclosure: I am.