Should I give my tour and activity photos away on free on Facebook to increase my social media presence and stop selling them?
No, it’s destroying your ability to engage with and connect with your customers and their friends on social media.
If you give your tour and activity photos away for free to Facebook, there are a few assumptions being made.
- Your guests will go to Facebook and actually be able to find their trip photos amongst all other posts.
- Your guests will interact with your brand and hopefully Like you or provide a review.
- When they Like you, they won’t mind their Facebook feed having other people’s trip photos appear on their feed everyday.
- The Like that you received will last far into the future and you won’t see a high number of Unlikes.
- That Like will translate into engagement on your future posts, which can likely lead to repeat customers.
- Those posts, with high engagement, will appear on your guests’ friends feeds.
- That increase in social presence, will increase the level of return customers you have each year and win you new ones.
- New bookings will increase your revenue greater than what photo sales contributed to your business.
The achilles heel in this scenario is user engagement. Are your Facebook followers actually engaging with your posts? If you have high engagement levels, you win. If you have low engagement levels, you lose. It is this black and white.
What’s your engagement level on your Facebook posts? To calculate, take the number of followers you have and divide by the average number of likes a post gets per month.
Let’s say you have 1000s page likes and on average about 10 people engage with your posts. This means you’re only getting 1% engagement.
Having lots of followers with low engagement, means you are not going to show up on people’s Facebook feeds. “That’s because when you post new content, Facebook places it on the newsfeeds of a fraction of your followers to test how interesting it is. If the response rate is high, Facebook shows it to more followers. If not, it doesn’t.” Derek Derek Muller, of Veritasium. Check the details here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g.
What gets high engagement levels? “Original, fun content that users like and can interact with. What’s the best funny picture of the day? Hey look at this fun thing we did! Check out this backflip! These lovebirds are on their honeymoon!” That’s what gets your guests wishing they were back there with you and interacting with your posts!
Look at your posts to see which ones get the highest engagement levels? Is it the daily trip photos you are providing free, or fun content?
Posting daily trip photos everyday of your tour groups doing the same activity, means you’re basically pressing the repost button over and over again. The same content, with no originality, is being posted to your feed and that of your followers. You are not creating interesting content for your followers to engage with over and over again.
It is only interesting to that one group that went that day, provided that they could find their photos. This means that your posts get low engagement levels, which Facebook takes as a sign that your content is poor and therefore not worthy to be on anyone’s Facebook feed.
To get higher engagement, you may have to pay Facebook to boost your posts. This is a win for Facebook, not for you. This wouldn’t be necessary if you had highly engaged users.
Bottom line, more likes does not equal more engagement. If you want a ton of likes and no engagement, you are probably better off spending $10 to buy 1000s of fake Likes that never interact with your brand or your content.
Your goal should be increasing engagement, via original fun content. You will then be able to truly leverage Facebook for it core purpose, social networking. This can translate into new business for you and repeat customers. This is how you get seen on tons of people’s Facebook feeds and hopefully increase your bookings. This is what the best players do.
So what should you do with your tour and activity photos?
Continue to sell photos to your guests, but integrate it with your social media. It is a proven fact that people love to buy tour and activity photos. Photos are one of the best and easiest revenue streams in a tour and activity business’ pocket. Do not give it up.
Photo just have to be done right. It needs to be easy for your staff to sell and your guests to buy. Your guests need an easy way to share their photos to social media, for their friends to see. They need to be able to easily Like and Follow your social media accounts.
If this is the case, you’ll get highly engaged guests on your Facebook or other social media accounts. They will be significantly more likely to interact with your brand and your posts.
This means that you can now use your social media accounts, like Facebook, to produce engaging content, that gets you a ton of Likes. As a result, with high engagement levels, it shows up on your guests’ and their friends’ news feeds. This will hopefully translate to increased ticket purchases.
Using PicThrive, when your guests get their photos, they can share with 1-click to their favourite social networks. Importantly, they can like your Facebook page or Follow you on Twitter with 1-click right from their photo gallery.
This means with PicThrive that you are getting highly engaged guests who are more likely to interact with your posts. Your Facebook is not overwhelmed with boring, repeated content and is therefore going to engage more people and their friends. With higher engagement, you will show up on more people’s newsfeeds and hopefully that will translate into a boost in your bookings.
Did we mention your staff can sell tour and activity photos with 1-click using PicThrive immediately after a tour? We also provide a way for you to automatically sell photos to guests after they leave. Simple and easy for your staff and a nice boost to your bottom line. PicThrive also helps you get more reviews on TripAdvisor to help increase your ranking.
With PicThrive, tour and activity operators can increase their social media presence and boost photo’s lucrative revenue stream. A win win for tourism businesses.
About PicThrive
PicThrive makes tour and activity photos easy, mobile and more profitable. It helps tour operators maximize photo sales, in-store and online. Operators are able to monetize social sharing to get real marketing results like more reviews on TripAdvisor and bookings. Sign up at www.picthrive.com.
To contact PicThrive, please email us at info@picthrive.com or call 1-866-706-9005.
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