Is Snapchat The Next Big Thing For Travel Brands?

Is Snapchat The Next Big Thing For Travel Brands?
Emma Mackenzie
By Emma Mackenzie
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While Instagram has been used by tourism brands for a while now, social media influencer Li-Chi Pan reckons Snapchat is the platform that’s set to be hot, hot, hot.

Speaking at the Travel Daze conference in Sydney yesterday, the social media influencer – who recently worked with Tourism Dubai on a campaign – said Snapchat was one platform she utilised throughout the trip, sending daily snaps to the followers of Tourism Dubai.

“It’s a platform people should keep an eye on,” she said. “People enjoy seeing not such a staged image.”

However, Jesse Desjardins from Tourism Australia shook his head at the idea, saying for Tourism Australia, which is the most followed and engaged with tourism brand on Instagram according to David Fairfull, founder of social media sharing platform Scrmhub, social media marketers shouldn’t get so bogged down on being on every platform.

“It’s at the point where you can’t do everything,” he told the room of travel industry professionals at The Belvoir Theatre. “It’s really important you focus on things you think you can deliver the most amount of value on.

“[For us] it’s really hard to justify Snapchat, when you’re getting great results on Instagram.”

Desjardins also said it was important for a tourism brand to focus on its infrastructure first. Often going to conferences, marketers see presentations, see the results other companies are getting and think ‘oh we must copy them’.

However, he warned against doing this before making sure it was right for your brand and that the infrastructure was solid. “Anything can look good on power point,” he said, to chuckles around the room.

When asked my moderator and journalist at Travel Weekly, Tara Harrison, whether brands have to pay now to be seen on Facebook, Paul Nahoun, client partner of the travel vertical at Facebook and Instagram said it was about making sure you’re doing the right things for the right audience.

However, he did admit: “It does take advertising on platform to get message out there because there’s so many more people sharing on the platform.”

Brands do need to figure out what works best for their audience and on which platform, regardless of whether it’s paid or organic. Even if you throw a heap of dollars at paid advertising on a platform such as Facebook to get your brand out there, if the message is rubbish and doesn’t fit with your brand, it won’t help.

As Tourism Australia’s Desjardins noted: “If you can’t do organic well, you’ve no hope at doing paid.”

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