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Social Media Cottage Marketing Guide

Social Media InfographHow to Promote your Holiday Cottage on Social Media

In this guide we aim to help you navigate the world of social media to promote and market your holiday cottage. We will cover:

 

Introducing Social Media

First of all, it’s important to define what Social Media is. Social Media has taken the internet by storm over the past 10 years mainly due to some very popular websites that help users share and exchange information, photos and videos in communities. Common to all social media websites are an element of social online interaction.

Most people understand Social Media to include websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Social Media can include a wide variety of websites though with blog websites falling within the category of Social Media, as well as forums and websites such as Linkedin and YouTube. Websites such as Pinterest and Instagram are also social media sites with a growing user base.

Some of the most popular Social Media sites used within the UK include YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and My Space. Pinterest and Instagram are ones to watch with a reportedly fast growing user base.

 

Businesses are able to use most if not all of these social media channels, currently for free, although for promoted posts and tweets, these are available to businesses at cost.


Which Social Media Channels to use to Market your Holiday Cottage

If you are new to social media it makes sense to start with using one or two popular social media channels and to start using these for marketing and promotion at first. Facebook and Twitter are both hugely popular websites so are the natural starting place for most businesses.

Common to both of these websites is the concept of posting photographs, updates and links.

 

How to Use Facebook for Promotion

The first thing you’ll need to do is set up a user account on Facebook if you don’t already have one and then set up a business page for your holiday cottage. You should read Facebook’s guide to promoting your business.

Remember to make your Holiday Cottage Facebook Page look as appealing as possible, and include your phone number and web address plus photos.
 

Gathering Friends and Getting Started on Facebook

With Facebook the idea is to gather Friends and Likes, so adding a Facebook Like button to your email sign off and to your website can be a good way to start creating connections on Facebook. It is also possible to pay for Promoted posts to get likes for your business, but you need to make sure that your Facebook ad has a clear call to action, an inspiring photograph and is going to attract the sorts of people who are going to be interested in your holiday home.

Once you have some previous holidaymakers and potential new holidaymakers liking your Facebook page it’s time to start connecting with them. Posting photographs of your holiday cottage, the surrounding area, updates about events going on near your location and links to your website are just some ideas when it comes to connecting with holidaymakers old and new.
 

 

 

How to Use Twitter to Promote your Holiday Home

Start by setting up a Twitter account for your business, you will need to choose a username so try to pick something that is related your holiday cottage name and is likely to make sense to others and be associated with your cottage. This can be tricky on Twitter as usernames are limited and many are taken so it can be worth brainstorming for ideas before setting up an account.

Once you’ve set your account up, you can customise your Twitter homepage, try to make it look appealing, this is your chance to sell your holiday home so using wisely selected photos is essential. There are many designs you can pick to use on Twitter, and you can also customise your Twitter homepage by uploading your logo and uploading a photo.

Once your Twitter Homepage is set up, much like with Facebook, the idea is to connect with others. Once you have connections, you can promote your holiday home with updates to interested parties. Rather than the concept of Friends, Twitter works on the basis of Followers, so to get going with Twitter you will need to follow others and hope that others follow you. Following related businesses can be a good way to gain followers and you can monitor who is following you. Once you have followed people you can choose to un-follow them if you don’t like their posts or if they haven’t followed you back and you don’t feel there is any connection there.

One of the best ways to get Twitter followers is to include a link to your Twitter page on your website asking people to follow you and to include the same in your email sign off.
 

Tweeting on Twitter

Unlike Facebook, updates on Twitter are known as Tweets and you have a limited number of characters that you can use in each Tweet. Tweets therefore have to be succinct and can’t go over the character limit or you will find that part of your Tweet is cut off.

Posting links on Twitter can be challenging as naturally links can take up quite a lot of characters. To get around this issue sites such as tinyurl.com have sprung up which will help you shorten down your long url to something compatible with Twitter.

As with Facebook, posting photographs can really help with engagement on Twitter and can help tweets look more visually appealing and eye catching.

 

Introducing the Hashtag

Hashtags # are used routinely in Twitter to indicate a keyword so that your tweet is more likely to come up in a Twitter Search for that hashtag.

Hashtags are also increasingly used on Facebook (but note that some studies state that too many hashtags lowers engagement so should be used sparingly and preferably at the end of a post) and hashtags are also used on Instagram and other social media channels by some people.

To tweet at someone, use the @ and then the person or organisation’s Username, so for example @username.

 

Next Steps with Social Media

At first it makes sense to just get familiar with using Twitter and Facebook to promote your holiday cottage. Once you’re familiar with these websites you can consider other social media websites out there and consider which are the best fit for your business. Some such as Pinterest you may be able to dip in and out of whereas others such as Twitter and Facebook work better when you are using them regularly.