How to be better at Instagram

By Steve Keenan

A month ago, we took six parent bloggers to Spain on a trip co-organised with the Costa Brava and Cataluyna Tourist Boards. You can see the results on Storify here, or on Flipboard.

One of the (many) highlights was spending a day with 250 Instagrammers on a morning in Cadaques, organised by the tourist board and town mayor, Joan Borell. Jen Howze of BritMums wrote a post about the day, which proved to be great fun.

And another bonus was the chance to chat with Julio Estrela, who has more than 10,400 followers on Instagram and who was on hand to give tips and advice. Enjoy the video - and get Instagramming….

Do hashtags work in tourism marketing?

By Mark Frary

If you have been in London recently, the chances are that you will have seen a new outdoor campaign for the Italian region of Puglia. The region has invested in large posters at various Tube stations and on the backs of London’s buses and it is backed up by a multilingual website at www.weareinpuglia.it

The campaign is interesting from a social media perspective because its tagline is #weareinpuglia as can be seen from the graphic at the top of this post. The hashtag and the contraction of the words shows that the destination marketing organisation behind the campaign is squarely taregting it at social media users. The recent decision by Facebook to support hashtags, which we wrote about last week here: Facebook joins the #hashtag frenzy - means that the campaign is very timely indeed.

The cross-over of hashtags from the online world to the offline is a relatively recent trend.

A good example of where this has worked is the mobile phone network Three’s famous dancing pony television advert. Viewers of the advert were encouraged to mash up their own dancing Pony videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/three/theponymixer and then share them using the #danceponydance hashtag.

Another good example is the #MarkeItWork hashatg used by the US fashion design reality TV series Project Runway, which you can read about on Mashable.

A hashtag used successfully across channels is a marketer’s dream. If used well, it means an offline campaign can be tracked using the online measurement tools that make digital marketing so compelling.

Where it seems to work best is in the world of television, where many people are using their tablets and smartphones at the same time as they are watching a programme on another screen.

So will it work for Puglia? The images used in the campaign are very compelling but I do wonder how people are expected to use the hashtag if they see a poster in London. A tweet saying “Poster makes we want to go to Italy #WeareinPuglia” perhaps?

Recollection of the hashtag from the outdoor campaign if you actually go there is unlikely to be strong either. ” Puglia is really beautiful #madeuphashtagaboutPuglia WTF!” instead perhaps. The hashtag seems not to have penetrated very far yet but perhaps it will come the summer.

We talked on this blog a while back about the #incostabrava hashtag used consistently by the region’s tourism board in various campaigns, including in its Instagram efforts - see Costa Brava and the Instagram experience.

I thought I would do a rough and ready comparison using Tweetreach.com, a useful tool for measuring the effectiveness of hashtags. Using the free version, you can analyse 50 recent tweets containing a particular hashtag and I compared the two. You can see the results below.

The headline figures are fairly clear but what is more interesting is looking at the breakdown of the use of those hashtags. In Puglia’s case, it is the marketing organisations themselves that are using the hashtag most. In Costa Brava’s case, it is other people.

It’s still early days for Puglia so things may change. I’ll look again in a few weeks and report back.

Facebook joins the #hashtag frenzy

By Steve Keenan

So, Facebook is about to follow Twitter and Google+ and introduce hashtags.

Several reports confirmed the move today, and Facebook posted on its own site the reasons behind the decision to follow the flow.

The post included the disingenuous statement: “To date, there has not been a simple way to see the larger view of what’s happening or what people are talking about.”

Well, hashtags have been around a while. And it’s just that Facebook didn’t get around to adding hashtags earlier, with Twitter leading the way as to how to aggregate topical comments on news and events.

Google followed, and now G+ suggests hashtags, forcing you to untick its suggestions if not suitable. So this is just a case of FB catching up.

But since Twitter introduced hashtags, there has been an online debate about their use. Or overuse, as users of Instagram often demonstrate.

Here, many users go beserk on hashtags in a desparate attempt to cover all bases and get their photo noticed.

Personally, I find it irksome - I don’t follow hashtags on Instagram and prefer to ‘like’ shots based on their merits not their marketing. But hey, that’s me.

Yet the sentiment appears widespread. Long before FB’s announcement, a page was set up on FB called This is not Twitter. Hashtags don’t work here - I cam empathise with that.

Twitter is perfect at being able to find all realtime comments related to, say, a murder in Woolwich or The Archers on Radio 4. Hell, we used two on a blog trip to Spain last week - #incostabrava and #catalunyaexperience - because they work brilliantly. I’ve always treated Twitter like a newsfeed of realtime events. I don’t use Facebook that way, nor G+ and Instagram.

That’s not to say Twitter is not misused (in the purest sense). It’s hijacked by interminable group chats, sponsored (hashtagged) tweets, comps and occasionally, ahem, blogtrips. But it was the first, so I can live with that. And I enjoy the scurrilous misuse for #twoptips and other funny and smartarse reasons.

I guess what irks is when good practise is copied time and time again until the point that social media networks all start to look same-y, when the individuality is chipped away at the edges and it all starts to look like a homogenous shout fest for the individual or company rather than the community.

Facebook also starts to look like a follower, rather than innovator. But perhaps I’m getting over sensitive. Social media is all about promoting a business, like any other form of communication, right?

Time for travel brands to revisit (or visit) YouTube

By Mark Frary

Travel brands using YouTube may get something of a shock when they look at their channel from today - it all looks a bit different.

This is because YouTube is rolling out its new One Channel look and feel to all channels from today, 5 June.

The idea behind One Channel is that it is supposed to make your channel look good no matter what device it is viewed on - whether that’s an Android phone, a desktop or a smart television.

The changes mean that you will have to rethink your channel art, the image that appears at the top of your channel. Many travel brands have already used this to good effect to promote themselves but the responsive, multi-device approach means that you are going to have to choose your new image carefully. The image above shows why.

When viewed on a television, the yellow area is what is displayed. The red area is what is shown when viewed on a smartphone and is the minimum compressed size when viewed on a desktop. having a good focal point is always essential for such images anyway so it will just focus minds a little more clearly. You can find the specifications here.

As well as the new spec for channel art, One Channel also has other new features. One is a teaser video that automatically plays when anyone who does not already subscribe to your channel visits. This is a great opportunity for travel brands to engage more with people interested in them. Brands who are serious about video should really think about the idea of creating and publishing regular video snippets and getting people to subscribe to them. Forget old school product-led videos but think more laterally - an interview with the farmer who supplies the food to your hotel, how to a swan from a hotel towel, five best tapas bars in Seville if that’s where your business is.

Vlogger Sonia Gil of Sonia’s Travels is one person who already switched to the new layout before today’s changeover (one of the 100 million users who choose to go for the new look in beta).

Hotels.com and Etihad are travel brands that have already made the switch to the new look. Travel Perspective also made the switch some months ago.

One Channel also lets channel owners take control of how their playlists are displayed, meaning you can now guide visitors to the content that you want. See below for how Etihad has used this to its advantage.

If you haven’t yet embraced video to market your travel brand, this is the perfect opportunity to do so. After all, the site recently passed the billion users a month milestone and those users are making more than four billion searches every single day. If you are not there and looking good, how will they find you?