Until this point, we haven’t really had a proper Facebook posting regime.
For the past month or 2, I have been scheduling posts for around 10 days in advance for once a day.
As I am not the tour designer, I rely on content created by the founder. I try to guide his content creation but It’s his words.
I use blog posts, website pages, our previous emails, everything I can find to create and tell a story about us. About our tours, about our way of travelling etc…
So I take the interesting bits and pieces of content, add a couple of interesting photos, sometimes a link or another CTA and share.
What I am doing for us on Facebook I would consider as hygiene factor according to Herzberg. It is kind of must, you must be present, people expect it and if you are not, it is a bad sign. If you are, that’s nothing special.
We are getting satisfactory engagements: likes, comments, private messages and enquires etc…and that’s great. But I believe we can do much more with Facebook than this. I will share what I mean in this post.
(You can see what I am doing on our page but I am doing it in the Slovene language www.facebook.come/enprimorc)
So if you have been struggling with posting on Facebook, my advice is:
- Spend some time in a focused session just creating FB posts and choosing photos for them. I use a google doc, write down the post there and name the folder where I put photos for the post.
- After you created multiple posts, put them in Facebook schedule post.
- See and try to learn what works for you and what doesn’t.
What posts get engagement, comments etc..and which ones don’t.
It can be helpful to have some sort of categories for posts so you can see the differences even more.
For example, for us, the categories are: authentic stories, customer reviews, destination posts, about us posts.
But to be honest I don’t think I will be able to really use this because there are a lot of mixed posts and there are no big differences in engagement.
What I’ve been seeing (was really not expecting it) for us videos or any other post type (slideshows, carousels) work worse than just plain text + photos. I can’t say that with statistical validity but more and more I believe it’s true. Will try to test a bit more but as you know, creating quality video’s is much harder then good looking photos. That is probably a part of the answer right there.
4. (I am not doing this yet but it’s my plan) Take the best working posts and put them into reposting software.
My next step is creating around 100 posts (I am probably around 60 now) that work well and adding them to be automatically re-posted.
As organic reach is low (supposed to be around 2% when I was last reading about this) and confirmed that third party posts work just as well as posting directly from FB , it would be a shame not using your FB posts multiple times.
There are many tools for that. I bought a licence for Social Bee but you have many many tools such as Recurpost, Buffer, Meetedgar, Hootsuite,…that do the same. Find what works for you. There are free tools and free trials for almost everything.
Next steps
Besides adding more and new posts, testing possible new content and FB post structures, what I believe the most important part of succeeding with Facebook is when the business owner adds his personal and authentic “self” in the game.
So now that we have a habit set up – at least one post each day and we are learning what works and what doesn’t, we are free to explore further.
I would call this “Adding the business owner into it”.
What do I mean?
A peek into the business owner’s world. And I am not saying just “behind the curtains” family life etc (which is great as well),…but also his beliefs, his thoughts, experiences,…his WHY and posting this as many times as possible live.
Catching the moment. Being true and likeable.
Things that are thought out in advance and things that just came up in your head. Images, videos, live streams. Sharing your world.
What’s exciting, what is boring, failures, successes, happy moments, sad moments,…
I love how Mountain men is doing it.
Personal, fun, sharing what they are doing, what they are all about and selling tours in the meantime.
Commenting, interacting, cracking jokes, making fun of themselves.
Showing who you really are. If you are more serious, that’s fine as well. Just show it. Be authentic.
(I am struggling with that myself. But it’s good advice. Everything becomes more fun which is so so important in our business and life)
In our case, we can definitely learn something from Mountain men.
Are there any tour operators on FB that you really enjoy following?
Comment, I am sure we would all love to see it.
Ok, to continue…
The goal of Facebook for us is getting emails and getting conversations.
So my plan is to try out some digital marketing strategies I see in coaching and consulting and see if they work for tourism.
What do I mean by that?
Offer people something of value and have them comment if they want it.
It can be a pdf lead magnet, video or just some thoughts about a topic.
One reason is you can quickly get feedback if it’s working or not.
Are people interested, is it getting their attention?
I can see how this way can be useful and am eager to test it in the future.
Haven’t yet seen it in tourism but I don’t see why not trying?
Starting conversations is important for us since we are very boutique and willing to invest a lot in each new customer.
I want to mention that all the principles of creating a good lead magnet still hold.
Because If people don’t find what you offer valuable and exciting, the strategy you use almost doesn’t matter as you will not get any engagement.
You find all the necessary information about creating lead magnets in my Lead generation guide.
This is just another way of using Lead magnets and generating conversation you can have in your arsenal.
I will let you know how it’s working for us if we decide to go use it.
CTA’s
What I am also focusing on is adding a CTA to as many posts as possible.
This means asking people to like, to comment, to share,…
I have a couple of such posts lined up already and am excited to see the results.
Quite happy with the first one. 11 comments is way above our normal rate.
What to post about?
I mentioned a couple of categories at the top of this post that we use:
- Authentic stories from the tour.
- Customer reviews and case studies.
- Destination posts – talking about the destination of your tour.
- About us posts – talkingabout the beliefs and the why of the business.
(Note that even if it’s about your business, It’s always about you and your customer together. From your story they have to see what you can do for them as well.)
Mat from Tourism tiger has some great pointers and ideas for posting on Facebook.
The quality of the content matters.
And I will call everything that comes from you being you (authentic) as quality content for your business. I believe it can’t be any other way.
Usually, there are still too many sales messages on Facebook timeliness.
Appropriate from time to time, just not too much.
Just don’t forget to be personal.
That’s it for now.
I will talk about Facebook a lot in the future.
Talk soon!
