Why It’s Time for Tour or Activity Operators to Use Social Media

Why It’s Time for Tour or Activity Operators to Use Social Media

Social media is increasingly popular, and you’re probably wondering whether you should jump on the bandwagon or not. The one thing that’s been holding you back is probably the fact that you doubt it’s worth your time, thinking it won’t impact your business in any significant way – and that’s where you’re mistaken.

Most tour or activity operators will justify their refusal to participate by saying that their prospects don’t hang out there, so it would be an ineffective communication tool. But even if you think most of your customers aren’t on social media networks (and even if you’re right), there are still other reasons why you should be using them:

1. Google loves social media

Cues from social media activities (like if someone shares, retweets or likes your update), are now being used by Google to help determine the relevance and authority of your site. The more relevant or authoritative your site is, the more likely it is to be closer to the top of those search results. This is called “organic search”, because what’s being displayed hasn’t been paid for – instead, it’s all according to Google’s natural code, which has recently been updated to incorporate social signals.

So having social media accounts actually helps you rank on Google’s search results page. There are obvious reasons why you want to be on that page for keywords related to your products or services; people trust Google, so more people will find you through it, and hopefully a large proportion of them will then make an online booking through your site.

2. More control over your online image

At the top of the search results for your brand name, would you rather have sites which you don’t have control over, or those which you do? The latter is obviously a better way to go – after all, you don’t have much control over what review sites and the like are saying about you, and you can achieve that through your social media accounts:

dive centre google ranking

Your content is also more likely to get found by PR professionals, journalists, conference organisers, business partners, and future employees that way.

3. It helps make other marketing efforts more effective

Social media is awesome at getting the word out there. Here are some practical tips:

  • Include ‘follow us’ buttons
  • Include social sharing buttons
  • Include content from your social media presence eg. ‘Pin of the week’ or ‘Follower of the week’
  • Add links to social accounts in signatures 

Publish content from your site to your social media accounts (and if you don’t have any, create some). We recommend starting with Facebook, Twitter, and especially Google+ (unsurprisingly, Google favours it a lot in its code). It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a fan base, or if whoever shares it isn’t a potential client. These things will come with time through consistency and momentum.

For more info, download our free eBook on social media for tours and activities: