The number of photos shared on the web is exploding. On Facebook alone, the
average number of photos uploaded per day is 300 million (and with their
acquisition of Instagram, this is only set to increase!).
What does this mean for travel brands? Well, people love taking photos of their
travel experiences and as travel becomes ever-more social, they are now instantly
sharing images of the every element of their travel experience across their
social networks.
So what’s driving this key trend?
You may have recently seen that a recent Mintel report
found Digital camera sales to have decreased
by 29% over the past five years. But
as Dirk Singer, Founder of TheRabbit
Agency, told listeners in a recent EyeforTravel webinar, this is due to the
fact that the cameras now found on most smartphones are (arguably) just as good
as entry level digital cameras.
Travellers are of course by nature on the move so the
rise in smartphone cameras combined with the growth of photo sharing networks
such as Instagram (80 million users), Pinterest (over 11 million unique users
per week) and Flickr (500 million registered users) is fuelling the phenomenon
of the new ‘visual web’ or ‘imagesphere’.
The socially-enabled visual web provides a fantastic
opportunity for travel brands to reach, inspire and engage new customers.
As the old adage says ‘a picture tells a 1,000 words’. Images enable the new time poor travel
consumer to absorb a large amount of data about your destination/hotel/airline
in a short amount of time. Combine this with the social reach – and, let’s
face it, we’ve all been sat in the office and seen that dreamy image of a sun
drenched pool pop-up in your friends latest status update - and you are onto a
winner.
Dirk identified this key opportunity for visual engagement
early on and led both the BMI and bmibaby social media campaigns on Pinterest
and Instagram respectively.
For the budget airline bmibaby, they facilitated a series
of ‘instameets’ exchange programmes where Instagram community members were
invited to destinations to participate
in a photo walk around their city and post and share their experiences from the
day with other members of the network, producing inspiring content from cities
around the world.
The representatives live photo blogged from the exchange
whilst the bmibaby team reported directly from the bmibaby Instagram feed,
Twitter and Facebook throughout the weekend.
The result was 50,000 unique pieces of visual content,
extensive media coverage and a number of awards for the campaigns. Not bad!
To find out more about the visual web and how you can get
involved with it, you can watch Dirk’s presentation here
In addition, I’m really looking forward
to Naomi Bustin’s (Senior Communication Executive at bmibaby)
presentation on how to get the most out of Instagram and other emerging social
networks at EyeforTravel’s Online Marketing, Mobile & Social Media in Travel Summit, 3-4 October in
Amsterdam.
The visual web looks set to continue grow in importance for
travel brands so get involved now! There
are a number of ways in which you can encourage your customers to share their
travel experiences – especially on-site during their stay. Ushuaia Ibiza Beach hotel is a great example
