Social Media Engagement Tips for Travel Companies

Social media is an engaging, even addictive medium, even for travelers. It’s a wise choice for travel agencies, travel marketplaces, and tour operators to explore and engage in.

This buzzword of engagement needs a little more clarification too. Why are you engaging with followers? Why would they participate? What is the essence of social media engagement in travel? How will we achieve excellence?

Social travel marketing is about image and engagement. These expressions of respect, caring, validation, support, and encouragement make a big statement about a travel company and its brand. When they like your attitude, relevance and significance, they become big fans.  That’s one of our objectives — to create fans and brand ambassadors. Customers will arrive later.

Travel Influencer Engagement

If you check out Influencer Hero, you get an idea of the impressive engagement rates that some travel influencers achieve. That doesn’t mean they’re successful, but something about who they are, what they do, and how they engage can be valuable to our research.

Social Media Strategy: Efficiency, Focused Theme, and Active Engagement

Both reach and engagement can take some time to build, so be patient.  With a plan, strategy and a little effort, we’ll create a core of really positive brand ambassadors/customers.  This engagement broadens reach to attract others to join the conversation.

As you might have read in the social media engagement strategy, our strategy creates a top-down framework to help you focus on what’s vital. At the core of your business social media engagement is a strategy that uses techniques and tactics. They should be aligned to avoid friction and waste.

In my own social media postings over 15 years, I’ve been all over the place with my connections, industries served, topics, clients and conversations. And that works against you. Followers get confused when I post on stock market, technology, marketing, property management, real estate sales, housing market reports and travel. In this post, we’ve got some tips that might help us get your social media engagement strategy right.

The more focused you are on a themed narrative, the easier it is:

• for followers to remember you and relate to you and your company
• to get past platform’s algorithm filters and restrictions to reach more connections
• the more useful your posts are to them
• the more successful your funnel is in converting viewers

The Operative Word then is Focus.

Besides your social narrative, is a focus on your top travel market niches. Your agency might sell a broad range of travel products from European culinary trips for middle-aged travelers, or ebike adventures for active adventurers in the Alps, cultural excursions in Bolivia or Italy, long stay trips for 60+ travelers, luxury tips to the Maldives, or beach vacations in Bali.

Promoting and engaging with them all at the same time, runs into the issues I spoke of with my own social posting. It’ll grind your engagement strategy to zero.

The wider the topics, the more friction and resistance you build. After a while, your travel audience will get turned off.  It might be better to segment your audience if possible as you would with email marketing, or post on one specific travel package type each week. Variety often weakens the intent/interest of each individual social connection.

We don’t have to get too military about it. Just always keep “focus” in mind as we plan your strategy and create your content and posts.

Committing to Real Engagement

After reading about how to create a social media marketing plan and a social media engagement strategy, we can move forward to these tips and techniques on how to engage travel customers uniquely on Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter (X).

Each social platform offers a different type of content and engagement style so it will take some time to develop each channel for your travel agency, tour company, hotel, or destination company. And some time for the travel social media marketer to groove a special place in each channel.

With social marketing, it isn’t what you post, it’s more in how you speak to users in the channel and whether it has any value to them. You can post exceptionally good content and offers yet still get poor results. The cause: lack of authenticity, personal involvement and sincerity.

That’s why in our social media engagement plan we create content or gifts or a great offer, and deliver them with a warm, focused personal presence. This is what influencers do.

Here’s what ChatGPT says about influencers: Social media influencers are successful in engaging people because they cultivate authentic, relatable personas and build trust with their audiences over time. They create content that resonates with their followers’ interests, values, and aspirations, often presenting themselves as approachable and genuine individuals rather than traditional advertisers. They engage with followers in a conversational manner which makes them feel more credible and relatable, driving higher engagement and loyalty among their audiences.

On this engagement techniques topic then, let’s discover some travel engagement tips that you might use in your campaigns.

Platform Engagement Tips

Facebook Engagement Tips

• Share Personal Stories: Post about your travel experiences, lessons learned, or challenges overcome.
• Ask for Input: “Which destination should I visit next?” encourages your audience to feel part of your journey.
• Celebrate Milestones Together: Share when you hit a goal, like launching a new tour, and thank your followers for their support.
• Host “Memory Shares”: Ask followers to share their favorite travel moments in the comments and respond to each.

Instagram Engagement Tips

• Behind-the-Scenes Content: Show your real, unfiltered moments of planning or experiencing travel, even if it’s imperfect.
• Use Story Polls and Questions: Create interactive opportunities, like “Guess this destination!” or “Ask me anything about this trip.”
• Emphasize Relatable Emotions: Focus on joy, wonder, or overcoming fears in your captions and visuals.
• Showcase User-Generated Content: Share followers’ travel photos and tag them to build mutual appreciation.

TikTok Engagement Tips

• Tell an Interesting Travel Story: Create short clips with emotional narratives, like “How traveling solo changed my life.”
• React to Comments: Reply to follower comments with video responses to make interactions personal.
• Challenge Participation: Start a travel-related challenge, like sharing “the most magical travel moment” with a specific hashtag.
• Show Vulnerability: Share funny mishaps, packing mistakes, or first-time experiences to make you relatable.

YouTube Engagement Tips

• Vlog Your Journey: Share authentic, emotional accounts of your trips, including highs and lows.
• Respond Thoughtfully: Take the time to answer comments with warmth and detail.
• Create Viewer Shoutouts: Mention specific followers or their comments in your videos to build a connection.
• Inspire and Motivate: Post content like “How travel can heal you” to tap into deeper emotions.

LinkedIn Engagememt Tips

• Share Meaningful Reflections: Post about how travel has shaped your personal growth and insights.
• Involve the Community: Ask professional travel questions like, “What’s the one travel experience that changed your perspective?”
• Celebrate Followers’ Journeys: Highlight travelers’ stories and contributions that align with your brand’s values.
• Write Long-Form Posts: Dive deep into transformative travel stories that readers can emotionally connect with.

Twitter X Engagement Tips

• Tweet Travel Epiphanies: Short, poignant realizations about life and travel can spark retweets.
• Live Tweet Events: Share real-time emotional impressions while visiting a destination.
• Create Thread Stories: Narrate travel experiences in multiple tweets, ending with an impactful conclusion.
• Thank Your Followers: Public gratitude tweets foster warmth and connection.

Pinterest Engagement Tips

• Pin Inspirational Quotes: Combine travel imagery with heartfelt sayings that resonate emotionally.
• Create Mood Boards: Curate pins around emotional themes like “Finding Serenity” or “Adventures with Family.”
• Share Planning Journeys: Post pins that detail how you emotionally approach planning unforgettable trips.
• Engage Through Comments: Actively comment on followers’ pins to build a reciprocal relationship.

Through the research, we’ll determine which social channel is ideal for your travel firm. Youtube for instance has immense opportunity, however the demands for production are high and expensive.

Facebook offers incredible reach to an active audience and Facebook ads and paid post-boosting campaigns can help us learn a lot about audiences and what they like to hear and see.

And Linkedin has its reach too, to a wealthier, active audience, particularly business travelers.
Instagram is perfect for reaching active travelers but demands for content are challenging to deliver on and require skill.

Your choice depends on your specific audience whether Gen Z’s and Millennials, American families, 60+ senior travelers, or the American road warriors planning their 2025 summer vacation.

Check out more on digital marketing services for travel companies.  Contact Gord at 416 998 6246 to discuss content strategy, SEO, PPC and social media marketing for a profitable year 2025.