Research on Kvarner: DONE
Plans on touring Kvarner: DONE
And with all this information on the blog and social media, a thought comes to mind... what then?
So much time is spent reviewing other blogs and planning out an entire 7 days of travelling along the gulf and then taking the trouble of formatting it all to be able to post it online for everyone else to see. All this could just be done personally to be honest. So, what is all this for? Well, we do it for self-satisfaction of course. Then there’s the joy of seeing many likes and positive comments and learning from any critical feedback comments. Aside from that, there’s actually more that we can do with such data and this blog will talk about how.
For travel bloggers or small-time social media icons like us, likes and comments is our world. The likes or thumbs ups or hearts or whatever you may call it – the more of it we get the better. The positive remarks are an ego boost while the negative or criticizing remarks show us how to improve our posts and expressions. However, for tourism operators and those who literally make a living out of social media marketing, this data is extrapolated and used to then give future customers a better experience. In my opinion, there are three main ways to use analytics to improve the customer’s experience.
1)Analyze and evaluate
With technological advancements on the rise, tourism operators could easily use software to analyze the social media strategies. For example, what type of posts gets more likes, what time of the day posts are more frequently viewed and monitoring the comments and feedback customers post. Such software can also combine analytics of various social media platforms and display it on to one graph for a compiled view rather than needing to look at each platform one by one.
Currently, such software already exists on the market as can be seen from this website: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-analytics-tools/ that recommends the 8 Best Social Media Analytics tools of 2018. These existing softwares might be more applicable to smaller tourism companies who don’t want to further invest in creating their own analytic softwares. However, larger companies would be able to employ their own engineers and software designers and could choose to invest in creating their own analytics that would be more tailored towards the company’s needs.
Based on the analytics, tourism operators and companies would better be able to identify what their customers like and what types of posts and offers are most appealing to customers: not just to retain their interest, but to also recommend the operator to their friends and family. Based on those statistics, operators would subsequently know what they should repeat and what they should improve in their operations in order to retain customer value.
2)Divide and conquer
Social media platforms are designed differently. Correspondingly, customers react and respond differently. Operators can make use of these separate platforms to reach out to consumers in different ways. Take a look at Nike’s Social Media Marketing for an example.
This seems to be a rough gauge on how their social media is split:
Instagram to generate interest and advertise their products by endorsing athletes/ celebrities
Twitter to respond, advise, interact via short replies and motivational quotes
Facebook as a center for all its activities (eg. photos, videos, shopping, events, location)
Nike’s example is not a guide on how to interact and generate value from customers but it certainly does seem as if this large commercial sport organization has definitely managed to retain its fans and attract new ones. Essentially, companies must understand how the platforms they are using are best suited towards their target audience so as to better engage them.
Since I’m a avid Instagram user let’s just have a glance over this one platform. Instagram for example captures words through an Image – people are often drawn by the pictures first before reading any captions. You guys would already know that I manage the Instagram account @barbrothers_singapore – so just take a look at these two posts that were posted less than a week apart.
A Guinness World Record attained by one of our members was featured in the papers and it’s extraordinarily impressive. But the whole chunk of words and a couple of photos isn’t as captivating as the whole team going bare bodied and flexing for the camera. Using this simple analytic, clearly I would know to show more muscle and less words in future posts to pump up the likes and attractiveness to better engage the fitness community and audience that the account is geared towards serving.
Similarly, a tourism operator displaying a wordy or advertising image may not be as captivating as a beautiful sunrise or view by the ocean with a caption that then channels the focus towards the image’s purpose.
3)Have Heart
The last point in my opinion, is perhaps, the most important. In order to better retain custo
mers and have them recommend the tourism operator to others, there is a need to capture and hold their value.
To engage customers, I feel it is crucial to respond to their feedback and interact with them. As seen above, even such a large company like Nike makes the effort to respond to questions asked by consumers. Imagine commenting on a post written by your favourite travel blogger or tour organization and having them then replying to you.
As cliché as it sounds, it’s the little things that matter. Example, if a customer commented on the tourism operator’s Instagram post of a beach saying “Wish I could be here” the operator could even comment “We wish you could be too. Have a great day ahead!” and even such a short reply like this could go a long way to boost customer satisfaction.
This having ‘heart’ or initiative I feel, adds an extra edge to the organization. Such interaction would help with future customer relations and engagement. Tourism operators could have a department designated to responding and interacting with customers, so as to provide this improved experience for them – so as to get them to eventually come back or recommend others to the operator again.