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.

The Power of Facebook

I sent an update last night to all fans of our New Mexico page on Facebook, saying how great it was that we have got 3,000 new fans in just a week, and asking how long it would take us to get to 10,000.

In less than one day, 236 people ‘liked’ this and a further 79 wrote comments! Pretty amazing really. The comments are really powerful and demostrate an almost universal love for the state!

Needless to say we’re almost at 10,000 – we’ll be there easily by Monday.

See for yourself here!

Blow by blow blogging – do we really need to know?

When does information become ‘too much information?’

A friend of mine has been selected for jury duty and has been keeping everyone up to date on all the action via his Facebook status. Including what the courthouse serves for lunch. Tuna pasta bake, incase you were wondering.

Another friend has been having surgery and has thoughtfully been providing a gory stitch by stitch commentary on Twitter.

Aside from the vision of her in hospital, half conscious and clutching her BlackBerry, the thing that concerned me most was how quickly she managed to update her friends and family. With the simple click of a button, 287 people were brought up to speed on the fact that her ribcage felt like ‘Mike Tyson has gone twelve rounds with it, it’s as bruised as a manky old peach.’

So just how much do we need to know? How much of someone else’s thought processing can we all process? Social media is effectively eliminating the need for actual socializing; why pick up the phone and spend time talking to people when a simple status update tells them all?

Networking has so many incredible benefits that we simply must embrace, for example just look at the story of tragic Rob Williams, a snowboarder who went missing in the French Alps. His friends were so desperate to find him, they sent out a Twitter message appealing for his mobile number. Sadly, Rob was found dead seven hours after the search began, but the story reiterates just how valuable social networking has become to our society today.

Life or death situations aside, are we in danger of burning ourselves out with the day to day application of social media tools? Are we becoming addicted to finding out what other people are thinking, doing, or having for dinner?

Is this a form of escapism from our own lives? Or are we actually so exciting that we just have to shout from the Facebook status rooftops about just how super-duper our lives are? Are we now so advanced in online and mobile gadgetry that regular letters and phone calls will eventually become obsolete?

Thoughts on a bog-standard postcard please…..

Marilyn Monroe Facebook Event

It’s not too late to sign up on Facebook for the hottest exhibition of the year – the world’s biggest collection of genuine Marilyn Monroe memorabilia to be shown in one exhibition – in Jersey this year. You can register your attendance on Jersey’s Facebook page here.

The exhibition, to be held at the Jersey Museum from 25 March 2009, combines iconic costumes with accessories, jewellery, keepsakes and trinkets owned by Marilyn.

The Jersey Museum is open daily from 10am -4pm. The exhibition is expected to run until the end of December 2009.

The future of communication

We, at McCluskey International, are very proud of our communication skills – and so we should be, we have one of the biggest and best destination PR divisions in the UK. We can do Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg etc and we are even rather good at blogging. We pride ourselves in keeping up with technology and the ever evolving world of communication.

But, what happens next? What of the future generation? If you are the parent of a teenager, or ever had one in your house, or have even been one then you will know what they are like. Mr Richard Cairns, Headmaster of Brighton College quite recently described them as something similar to the caterpillar consuming twice its weight in food each day or the creature in between, loafing in its impenetrable cocoon. The good news is that they do emerge from the chrysalis at about 17 or 18 years old, not quite a butterfly but at least preferable to its preceding forms.

So, imagine my delight when my 18 year old son sent me an email – communication at last I thought! However, my joy soon dissolved to horror, confusion and frustration. I really needed another 18 year old to hand to decipher the content of this email. It was purely “text speak” – no capital letters, no full stops or commas, hardly any vowels and absolutely no sense of grammar. It took me quite a while to work out his demands.

This is how our future generation is communicating with each other. How does this transcend to the workplace? Don’t tell me that you have never had to resist the temptation to send a work colleague a quick “c u l8er” via your Blackberry. There seems to be a fine line between texting and emailing when it is all coming from the same piece of technology. As teenagers become adults and every person has a Blackberry who is going to teach these young adults how to communicate in the good old fashioned way? Or, have I got it all wrong, will there be queues to join “text speak” workshops so that we can keep up with the younger, more hungry, energetic and motivated workforce? Perhaps we should do something about it whilst they are still sleeping in their cocoons oblivious and disinterested in the outside world? Wotever!

New Mexico’s Facebook Frenzy

Way back in July 2008, we launched our very first client Facebook page, on behalf of New Mexico. In just six months, the number of fans rocketed to over 3,000!

You can see New Mexico’s Facebook page here. If you visit, you’ll also see that fans have uploaded over 200 photos, a video, have contributed over 70 wall posts, and made over 20 comments about movies filmed in the state.

We also decided to launch a dedicated Flickr group, and posted details of this on the Facebook page. Within minutes we had over 20 photos uploaded. It’s really encouraging to see such immediate results from a relatively simple social networking campaign. There have been so many positive comments from people who live in the state, those who have visited, and those who dream about visiting one day. We will definitely be continuing with our Facebooking, and look forward to seeing you there!