With so many vacation rentals available, it is important to get noticed among all of the competition.
Successful social media marketing to promote your vacation rental business is vital. Almost 70 percent of Americans use some form of social media, making it a popular and inexpensive way to get the word out about rental properties.
Social Media For Vacation Rentals
Social media for vacation rental promotion allows you to build awareness, extend your reach and connect with guests and prospective guests with tools like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and forums.
1. Facebook
Not Surprisingly, Facebook is the most popular social media platform. By sharing useful and relevant posts, you can use Facebook to connect with past guests and promote your rental to attract potential future guests. You can easily promote your rental, post updates about the amenities you offer and let people know about any discounts you have.
Facebook enables you to share photos, videos, links, and other updates. Show people not only your house or condo that is for rent, but scenery, attractions, and other exciting things to do in the area.
What To Post About:
While your ultimate goal is to entice people to visit and book your accommodations, be careful about constant self-promotion because this will turn people off. You want to make sure you are providing value in your posts.
Constant self-promotion is not valuable and will not attract long-term, loyal followers and customers. Give people a reason to follow you and continue to follow you even after their stay.
Here are some suggestions for topics you can post about. In between posts about your property, list the top activities for guests to enjoy and include photos. Post about events, activities for children, good places for shopping, museums, galleries, swimming pools or things to do on a rainy day.
Connect with other business that your guests may enjoy and share content back and forth with each other. Share information about local eateries, events going on nearby, travel tips, etc.
2. Twitter
Twitter is another great tool to promote vacation rental business to potential travelers. Use Twitter on a more personal level to connect more closely with people, local businesses, bloggers and journalists.
What To Tweet About:
Because Twitter has character limitations, post shorter, more frequent updates about your rental business and post links to other relevant businesses.
Be helpful, providing worthwhile information. Be engaging, respond to others and have conversations. It is also always good practice to use images with your twitter posts.
Tweet about your accommodations and any specials you’re offering. However, don’t make Twitter all about yourself, avoid being overly promotional and spammy. You can tweet about local news, attractions and other things of interest to tourists. Follow plenty of local businesses, restaurants and other tourist accounts.
Retweet great tweets about other things going on locally, and ideally, you’ll get some retweets of your promotional tweets.
3. Pinterest
Pinterest allows you to share pictures of your holiday rentals, as well as other enticing photos that are related to things your guests would like. As of late, Pinterest is used more and more as a search engine.
It is a great tool for showing off your vacation rentals, the local surroundings and food unique to the area. Food and travel are a couple of Pinterest’s most popular subjects.
What To Pin:
Make a board about your property, pinning photos from your website. Also, make boards about local dining, things to do and attractions to visit. Pin images that present the whole experience guests can get, including the accommodations, landscape, area architecture, food and events.
Again, you want to make sure you’re providing value, so don’t be afraid to create boards of other subjects that are indirectly related to your business. Think of topics your guests, or potential guests, are interested in.
Since Pinterest’s focus is visual, the photos you post must be visually appealing, in focus and have good lighting. Images you post should always be portrait, rather than vertical and ideally be 735 by 1,200 pixels in size.
Write strong captions for your pins with optimized titles for your boards, so people can find your content. Make your pins interesting and shareable. Sharing is a staple of participating in Pinterest with over 80 percent of pins being re-pins. Re-pin other people’s pins that complement the themes of your boards.
This type of engagement will go a long way towards building your following and presence on Pinterest.
4. YouTube
With over a billion users, YouTube can be a great marketing tool, and YouTube videos can show up on Google searches. Video is a great way to draw people’s attention and show them the unique benefits and you have to offer.
What Videos To Post:
YouTube easily enables you to upload videos to display your rental and highlight the area to attract visitors. You can target guests who are planning their trip and even capture the interest of those who still in the early stages of thinking about travel.
Your YouTube videos can be a simple presentation with a montage of photos. Animoto is an easy to use tool to help you create slideshow videos. YouTube makes it simple to edit and add music to your videos.
Make sure to optimize your channel name with keywords for your business. Use your video description to incorporate plenty of key phrases to describe the perfect holiday experience that you are offering. Don’t forget to share your YouTube posts to your other channels as well.
5. Forums
Forums are for people to have conversations, ask questions and provide information. Contribute to discussions on the “holiday rental” topic. Participate in conversations related to events and attractions in your area.
You can use forum discussions to connect with other people that have similar interests and potentially find new guests. Forums can also be a place to meet other owners to learn and talk about best practices in holiday rentals.
When participating in forums keep in mind that overt advertising is usually discouraged, but interacting on forums is a good way to network and build relationships.
Additional Tips
Ask your guests to leave reviews, share their experiences and encourage them to share photos of their experience as your guest on social media.
Further, encourage them to follow you on Facebook, Twitter or your other social media channels. This is an excellent way for you to stay in touch with them and extend the reach of your brand and your content.
Respond promptly to comments and questions made by users on your profiles. Share content between all of your pages to increase its reach and re-vamp it every now and again to maximize your efforts. Consider creating a content calendar, plan your content in advance and rotate through different topics.
All of this may sound like a lot of work and maintaining social media for vacation rentals may be time consuming. However, there are social media scheduling tools, like Hootsuite or Buffer, which can help you organize and schedule your posts across your social media channels, managing your time more effectively.
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Need help marketing your vacation rental business on social media? Thrive Internet Marketing Agency is here to help! Our social media experts can market, manage and advertise your business to maximize its potential on all social media channels. Contact Us Today.
