Standing out of the crowd is not an easy task on social media. If your business uses #travel on Instagram, then you’ll notice it’s been used over 678 million times. 

But don’t let this worry you. Having a social media presence helps your business create a personal connection with your customers and there are so many ways you can achieve this. From giveaways, sharing customer holiday photos and testimonials, promoting fun facts about your top destinations to running travel polls and quizzes, the ideas are endless for engaging your followers. Just make sure on every marketing channel that you’re encouraging your customers to follow your accounts.

If you don’t feel the content you’re producing is getting much traction, it’s best to get back to basics and reflect on how social media can help you achieve your business goals. Do you need to write a social media strategy, which will encourage you to analyse who your audience is and what you’re trying to achieve on each channel? Each social media channel is also very different, so if you’re a small business, having a presence on too many can spread your focus too thinly. Learn to find your audience and maximise the best use of each channel.

To help you best target your audience, are you prepared to spend some budget on social media advertising and if so, do you or a colleague require some training? Why not consider attending one of ABTA’s social media or digital marketing training events to learn from others in travel and get lots of ideas. 

If you want to develop trust with your audience, why not promote your ABTA membership? Did you know, 83% of consumers say being a member of ABTA is an important element when booking a holiday and 73% say they are more likely to book with an ABTA member than a non-member.

A large part of my role is developing social media marketing plans to help members promote their membership and encourage your customers to book with you over a non-member. I upload suggested social media posts and designed graphics to the ABTA marketing toolkit for members to download. Take a look here.

Since summer 2022, we’ve been encouraging members to use #WeAreABTAmembers in all your social media posts as a simple and quick way to show your customers that you’re a reputable travel provider. Whenever we see members post using either the ABTA logo in their creative or the hashtag, we share to ABTA’s accounts to get your posts more reach. 

Now that’s a great way to stand out from the crowd.

Lizzie O’Donnell, Digital Marketing Manager, ABTA