
The Story of the Barbados Historic Railway Movie Writing this…
Marketing Hotels & Tourism | Research, News & Tutorials for Hospitality & Destinations
Instagram’s IGTV, used for marketing stories, highlights and posts with video, has taken a huge step forward as Instagram has added IGTV Integration. It is now an integrated platform that can be a powerful launch pad for promoting any product or service. This is especially true for hotels and tourism destinations.
This blog shares several ideas and illustrations of how this can work.
For the integration to be complete, you first need to upload your video to IGTV. The video should be more that 1 minute long and can be as long as 1 hour for verified accounts. Other accounts have a maximum of 10 minutes.
To upload, just go to your Instagram account using your desktop browser, log in and follow the steps as outlined in Instagram Help.
Source: https://help.instagram.com/225190788256708
On Your Smartphone
If you prefer to do this on your smartphone, download Filmr or the Instagram IGTV app.
Filmr is a more useful tool as it allows you to create and edit videos.
ON IGTV, Choose the Preview Post Option
Instagram gives you the option to share a 1-minute preview of your IGTV video to your feed.
Before you post the IGTV video (click Post item #6 above), click the Post a Preview Button on.
Now click Post #6 above
Now you have an IGTV video and a shorter version of it as a Post. The post will play and let your viewers “Watch Full IGTV Video”.
About Stories
Instagram Stories are short 15-second teasers that may be images, videos and slideshows. Content in the story is live for 24 hours and then goes into an archive that is not visible. You can add text, drawings and emoticons to images or video clips in your stories. A story is an announcement that a new video or photo is on your site.
Anyone can tap your IG profile photo and your story displays.
Static IGTV Share does not tell the story.
A better way
Sharing your IGTV video to your stories’ channel may not be the best way to create a story.
The automated Share from IGTV is very basic as it just takes a snapshot of the video cover image. I
t does work but a better way is to upload a 15-second video that gives the flavor of the video and makes users want to see more.
Upload you video to your story (click on the + Sign under the Story button). Then:
To see the Description on a smartphone, users click on the icon at the end of the title
Now you have a story that will announce your news and, if you like, you can promote it. Remember: it will disappear in 24 hours.
You can also Promote the Highlight at any time.
Both are teasers that link to your IGTV video.
Your post also links to IGTV (but you can’t promote it or the IGTV).
The great news is that you can include a clickable link in the IGTV Video description.
Users will see the link and can click on it to go to your website or wherever you link too.
To see the description, users just tap the arrow icon following the post title.
These IGTV links are open to all.
Unlike stories that require you to have 10,000 followers, IGTV videos can include links no matter how many followers you have.
IGTV Clickable links make Instagram a competitive business alternative to YouTube and others.
This means you can promote your clients and your own business with high quality videos and clickable links on Instagram. Instagram marketers may offer clients a service that includes:
The list goes on. Your blog can be featured on Google News, which will create high authority with a quality brand footprint and expose the brand to a wide audience. Refer to our Instagram tutorials for ideas and tips on general insta-marketing.
Pros
The beauty of IGTV is clickable links. Instagram is very restrictive about marketing on its platform. They do not allow links unless you are paying to promote a post. They restrict links as they want the site to be about sharing and not affiliate marketing, self promotion or overtly commercial. For this reason it has become a high authority trusted site.
Now with IGTV you can add links into the description and users may click to your site of clients you may be promoting. This puts IGTV on the same footing as YouTube and other what have always allowed links. Also with the ability to link your post preview, your story and highlights to your IGTV link you can have at least 3 links to the TV video. You can promote the story and highlight as teaser that will drive traffic to you TV video and allow users to click to your website.
Cons
The preview Post looks just like a regular post but it is actually just a preview of the TV version. It has the sane URL. You cant promote the post. Also you can not at this time promote the TV Video. This seems counter intuitive. Most other platforms allow you to promote your main video but NOT Instagram. At least not now! You can promote the Story and Highlight, but it is an indirect link- That is you promote the highlight and you can link it to the TV Video, But users then have two click (Story and IGTV), And the IGTV link is hidden and only visible if users click on the description. That may not be most effective.. You may be better off linking your promotion directly to ythe URL in the IGTV- If so its you may embed the IGTV in your blog (as above)
On the plus side you van promote everything off site. You may embed it blogs, syndicate it and share it on social media.
(C) Ian R. Clayton
Digital Media Author, Blogger – Videographer
Writing this blog on getting “Your Travel Story on Google News” began with a tour of the St. Nicholas Abbey Heritage Railway. I was looking for interesting content to post to my Lifestyles of the Artisan Instagram Account.
I arrived early and took lots of photographs of the brand new vintage-style train, the engine cars and the station, including the cafe, gift shop and the grounds. The owners of St. Nicholas Abbey had created a replica of history with impeccable taste.
The station platform housed a museum of vintage prints, photographs and diagrams of the original historic railway track, its cars, engines and people. The photos tell a story of the train’s journey with beautiful images of the island.
All excellent material to create a story of the old vintage rails that were the work horses of the sugar industry in the 17th century.
The train departed the station with conductors and drivers all on board. It was short ride to the top of Cherry Tree Hill, where we all disembarked to see the magnificent view of the East Coast where the old train tracks rambled along the coast. Michael Brown, the engineer driver, mingled for a while answering questions.
How many carts were there? “40 at its height”, he said.
How did it carry sugar? In special sugar cars.
What did it cost for passengers? Ah! All that and more I will cover in my talk in just a few minutes. It started at just one penny and, yes, they did make a profit at first. But they did not reinvest and that, along with other mishaps and acts beyond control, led to the demise of the train.
Michael, as you will see, is a direct person with a keen insight and sense of humor. Check it out at https://barbados.org/blog/st-nicholas-abbey-heritage-railway/
That video became the feature of the blog that got on Google News. It not only got on News; Google featured it above all advertising and organic listings.
1. Articles Published on a High Authority Site. (DA 78) See Explosion
Explosion – a Google News Approved Website (GNA). GNA Articles accepted by google get featured in its news.
Importantly it is not our site and we do not take credit for the article. The article is written by a 3rd-party independent journalist. It has much more authority than if we wrote it ourselves.
2. Google summaries the article above the search results. It dominates the page.
3. A related video of the same story is featured under the article link.
4. Our blog linking to the Movie and Story is featured in #1 position of search results.
5. Search result #1 is a Related YouTube video.
6. Search result #2 is the Explosion news item.
NB: Our main blog is not on Page 1 – will examine that in another review coming soon.
1. A Barbados.org Main Story featuring the Movie –
https://barbados.org/blog/st-nicholas-abbey-heritage-railway/
2. A new Barbados.org Blog announces the Movie and Story.
https://barbados.org/blog/new-video-of-barbados-historic-railway
3. The Explosion News Item linking to Above
https://www.explosion.com/133453/barbados-showcases-new-movie-of-the-historic-railway-story/
4. In addition, there are several videos:
The Main Movie was published to Vimeo. A different version is on YouTube. A teaser video of the Turntable is also on YouTube. Several short versions and teasers were published to social media and other collateral.
5. Promoted via Social Media and Syndication
Each of the blogs are syndicated to social media and profile networks. We created and published several versions as Instagram stories, posts and IGTV movies to several Instagram profiles, each promoted with bookmarks (Social Media Announcements)
All this is straightforward Content Marketing and SEO work.
All are rich media and SEO-optimized.
Word Count is essential as Google looks for deep and wide-ranging content. The articles must covey expert authority and trust.
The Storyteller in the movie is the Star. Michael Brown delivers a fun and engaging narrative – full of historical fact, insights and innuendos. He acts off the rule book and the shows how passengers flagged down the train as if they were thumbing for a ride in a car today. His humor and joy permeates the story with a delightful Bajan accent and attitude.
The combination of a good story and user on-the-spot capture makes this newsworthy. Creating a current blog article that explains a bit about the story and the movie was the second vital strategy.
Thirdly, posting on a High Authority accredited Google News Approved (GNA) site was pivotal. Both the author and site are independent authorities. Self-promotion just does not work as well. You need independent accredited reviews and articles about your brand. Independent news articles linking to the site was the third vital key to success. That got it in the news.
The supplemental articles and promotions made it stand out as a key piece of content and created social action and traffic that made it stand out and rank above Wikipedia and all top sites.
See our article on Google News. Learn how to get approved by Google News. Click Here >>
(C) Ian R. Clayton
Digital Media Author, Blogger – VideoGrapher
,sSource: Is Facebook Organic Marketing Dead? : Social Media Examiner
The answer to the question “Is Facebook Organic Marketing Dead” is Yes and NO. A lot of things that once worked just don’t move the needle anymore. Consider this “that average organic reach is now 1% to 6%.” Not impressive at all.
And we now see that blog posts linked out of Facebook get the lowest reach an engagement.
Then on the other side of the coin we learn that Video is King – that is so load as it is native to Facebook and you load an original video to your Facebook page. Don’t even bother to share YouTube Video! They will just be seen by your friends, perhaps, and have no reach at all.
If you do upload a quality engaging video, BuzzSumo tells us that it will “outperforming photo and still image posts by 73%.” That is because Facebook sees its future in Video. It is closely watching the migration of television viewers and advertisers to digital media and the internet.
The article also gives tips on the various format and forms of video that you can use on Facebook. It explains the merits of each and is good reading for anyone panning to use video marketing on Facebook. For that matter, it applies well to any social media.
Of course the future for Facebook is in Advertising and to some extent that works. Their recent update on Ad Relevance and tracking will help advertisers asses their results. The question is will Facebook be relevant as the digital world transforms and new sites like Instagram steam roller into engaging travelers and inspiring them to look, book, and convert at a greater rate than Facebook.
Read the article for full details of what might be the better strategy for your Facebook social activity in the new digital divide.
Related: Digital Media For Hotels and Tourism – learn more with our Book Series here
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Source: Tim Berners-Lee laments state of the web but offers hope for travel brands | PhocusWire
When the Internets Creator says the Web is broken, the world listens!
This article chronicles statements made by Tim Brenner at a recent Seminar. It consider the impact of what has happened and its implication for travel and tourism.
Tim Breners-Lee, inventor of the Word Wide Web is worried. He explains that the World Wide Web he started was 0pen and collaborative. Today he sees it as manipulative and un-trustworthy.
In his presentation at the Amadeus T3CH event in Madrid, Spain, he says that “it is far from how it started with people having their own sites and linking to other blogs they liked.” In those days he tells us ” I would make a blog as good as possible, people would reward me for it by linking to it. The biosphere spread good links by curation and humanity became this wonderfully collaborative space.”
Unfortunately this wonderfully collaborative space is not what has happened today. Berners-Lee notes that algorithms now determine what we read in social media and on the Internet”. It has become to centralised and driven by advertising rather than peoples needs. The ad-based revenue model may be the Internet’s “biggest sin.” It portrays a feeling that everything is free but we are all paying a high price for persuasion at the expense of authenticity and privacy in ways we hardly know.
Berners-Lee suggests that the solution to today excesses is to return to decentralization the network. This gives consumers control of their data and access to it. Not that it should not be used, but giving control to the owner puts the brakes on how it might be manipulated and used to manipulate others.
Giving controll back to content owners has positive implications for travel where he sees travelers being able to store information on passports, travel preferences and past and upcoming trips on a Solid Pod. This could also give OTAs and travel companies better access to knowledge that can help in personalizing the vacation experience and planning process and offering travelers specific personal recommendations.
Read more about it at Tim Berners-Lee laments state of the web but offers hope for travel brands | PhocusWire
Source: Facebook Is Sunsetting Ad Relevance Source in Favor of These Metrics
Facebook’s relevance score is global summary of all positive feedback (i.e., clicks, app installs, video views), and negative feedback (i.e., someone clicking “I don’t want to see this”).
Many factors are analyzed and summed up in one single “ad relevancy metric” with a value of 1 to 10.
Because there are so many different aspects to peoples behavior, a single score does not reveal important variables that influence a purchase opportunity and a buy.
The new approach breaks the score into three new “ad relevance diagnosis” (below). With this new approach Facebook makes Ad reporting more relevant and helpful to advertisers!
Facebooks New Ad Score Makes Ad Reporting More Relevent
In addition, Facebook in overhauling several other tracking system. They include Offers Tracking, Messaging, and Mobile. Get the full story at Impact Latest articles and insights.
In Fascinating Travelers with PersonaHolidays we examine How to Fascinate Travelers. The article looks at how PersonaHolidays uses the Sally Hogshead’s Fascination Advantage® and learn how it applies to personality matching in hospitality and destination marketing.
Sally Hogshead of HowtoFascinate.com tells it like it is when she says “Don’t try to change who you are, be more of who you are”. She is an advocate of knowing your difference, which she says is often more important than knowing your strengths. “Instead of focusing on strengths, highlight your differences”. She also adds: “The greatest value you can add is to become more of yourself”.
Sally is the creator of the Fascination Personality Test – the world’s first personality assessment that measures what makes someone fascinating. Unlike the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or the StrengthsFinder™ Test, this assessment is not about how you see the world. It’s about knowing what makes you different and focusing on being true to who you are.
The test explores how people think and react to different questions. For a hotel brand, we delve a bit deeper into the hotel persona – its certification, awards, how staff and management reaction to situations, how they follow up on TripAdvisor and whether or not they participate on social media. A hotel’s decor, their website design, colors and content reveal and confirm personality. The hotel owners/managers are also invited to do the personal assessment to see how they are motivated.
The essential idea is to see how we are motivated. Sally has observed that there 7 prime ways we communicate that we all share: These are innovation, passion, power, prestige, trust, mystique and alert. The tests are a set of questions that she has developed and perfected over years. It is very concise and frankly amazingly accurate. Check it out here – it’s FREE.
Sally believes we should “stand out, or don’t bother”. Hoteliers tend to think of themselves in terms of market niche “We are a family hotel, we specialize in romance; Escape to Paradise”.
The problem is that these are not differentiations and they have to a large extent become platitudes. Diego Rodriguez, founder of the Power Marketing Consultants Association, says platitudes are the killer in marketing. As he says: ” A platitude is defined as “words or phrases that are drearily commonplace and predictable, that lack power to evoke interest through overuse or repetition, that nevertheless are stated as though they were original or significant.”
We all know it. But look carefully at your marketing and chances are you will notice you are using platitudes. We all do. Like Diego, Sally urges us to drop the platitudes and niche market obsession and to think instead of Personality. This is the real differentiation. It is exactly what the Fascination Advantage Assessment helps us develop for hotel brands. The archetypes are a large part of differentiation and what happens next enhances that with match-words related to travel.
In another story, we explained how Persona Holidays matched travelers with hotels based on personality. In summary, every PersonaHolidays hotel has a personality archetype. Using our own travel version of the HowtoFascinate Test, we create a brand archetype identity for each property and relate it to travel personas using travel-related keywords which we call ‘persona matchwords’. These words are the key to hotel-traveler matchmaking based on a personality archetype.
In the example, travelers who are looking for a different ‘off the beaten track holiday escape’ often chose the windswept, wild and rugged Barbados East Coast. They will visit the “Escape to the East in Barbados” page and find hotel characters like the Avant Garde or the Artisan. These are not just words but archetypes which the PersonaHolidays app pairs with travel personas. See the Barbados blog about Personality in Travel for details. Using sally Brand strategies we believe hotels, destination marketers and tourism operators can start Fascinating Travelers by understanding their individual needs and matching them with holiday options that are truly personal.
It may seem strange that brands have personalities but, in fact, HowToFacinate (HTF) began as a study of brand and product marketing. That started in 2006 when Sally, who had won many awards as an advertising copywriter working with brands such as MINI Cooper, BMW, Nike, Godiva and Coca-Cola, began studying why some messages got people’s attention while others got ignored.
“Our interdisciplinary study gave us a well-rounded perspective on the science of fascination. It revealed patterns of communication we hadn’t seen before.” From this Sally published Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation. This book became an instant hit with marketers. As she says: ” We began by studying what makes brands and products fascinating. Then we discovered how to take the same system and apply it to people like you.” (Source: HowToFascinate)
In PersonaHolidays, we do not subject travelers to a test. We do however assess all hotels. We discovered that there is not a consistent correlation between the hotel archetype and the travel persona. An Artisan can be a Connoisseur and a Connoisseur can have many interests: They may be Avant Garde, Artisans, Blue-Chip, Traditional, Conservative, Trendsetters, Outlandish or Soulful. In fact, they may be any one of the 49 archetypes. That is why the ‘persona matchwords’ are an essential part of the holiday and hotel matching process.
The Persona approach is to use the archetype to help us match travelers based on our behavior predictive systems. Hotel archetypes help us create a set of keywords (hotel matchwords) that we match to travel personas we create from a traveler’s search, behavior and nuanced preferences. The result is a personal holiday planning and booking system that is fascinating travelers.
The first Destination Marketing Organization to license the PersonaHolidays technology is the Barbados Tourism Encyclopedia for its holiday planning and bookings website Holidays.Barbados.org/stay – The installation has been very popular with travelers and bookings has increased significantly. On that site Barbados invites users to “Get ready to be Fascinated” with an “amazing hotel matchmaker that fits your personality”.
Step 1 – Understanding personality archetypes is the first step to understanding how brands can Fascinate.
Step 2 – Do the test with a qualified PersonaHolidays specialist and Get Listed.
More on the Persona Marketing System
– Licensing and Partnership Info >>>
The PesonaHolidays Investment Value Proposition Press Kit >>>
PersonaHolidays is the only app in the world that can deliver travelers who are a perfect match for your hotel travel persona.
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