Showing posts with label ROI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ROI. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Building YOUR Brand With Social Media?


We are sorry to say that if you aren’t using social media in your marketing plan, you are behind the times..

And if you are using social media, we are sorry to say that you are probably doing it wrong.



Although social media use is an extremely powerful tool in a marketing arsenal, it is not a cure-all and won’t be a viable source for direct bookings that you can measure. But it is vital to your brand and your online reputation.

For some reason, over the past several years social media has morphed from a fun, interactive tool to a trendy sales tool in the eyes of page owners and businesses—this is where the danger begins.



First, let’s think back to the birthplace of modern social media, Facebook.

Facebook was spawned from an invention of Mark Zuckerberg called Facemash, which was originally designed to rate fellow college students on their physical attractiveness (Yes, really). 

Over the years, Facebook has become an extremely engaging platform, even with the ability to market to users. But let’s not forget why Facebook was made in the first place—so people could engage online with one another on a personal level.

If you aren’t engaging your audience, you’re doing it wrong.

Think about this for a moment. You probably have 150 to 700 “friends” on Facebook. (Don’t worry about the business side, I’m speaking merely about your personal friends.) You’re popular, right?!?



However, do you have friends who hardly ever post? Maybe someone you didn’t really know, but who hit that “accept” button anyway? It’s not that they aren’t posting anything. It’s that you don’t hit their like button or comment on their stuff—ever. Facebook realizes this (through its algorithm) and filters out their content from your wall because you are clearly not interested in it.

Now apply that to your business page. If you have fans who never click “like” or comment on your posts, Facebook is going to show less and less of your content to them. It’s the algorithm!

If you post only promotional stuff and do not understand the algorithm, you’re doing it wrong.

People engage in social media for several reasons, and one of those is to maintain relationships. When we approach our fans with the mind-set of a relationship rather than a sale or a booking, we see more engagement, better reviews, and overall happier fans, both now and long term.



Here Is The ROI Issue

What kind of ROI can you expect from social media? That is a question that really should not exist. Yes, you can see the ROI in your social platforms; it does exist. However, asking this question means that you are expecting all your social touchpoints to result in bookings; it just doesn’t work that way. Social media bookings come from good branding, and good branding comes from patience and a well-organized plan.



If you are wondering where to start, ask yourself the following: “What sort of content do my fans like?”

You can publish various types of content and measure the results—count your likes and engagement. Facebook lays it all out for you in your admin panel. By promoting your brand in that fun, non-salesman way, you are giving your fans what they like. This leads to more engagement, which leads to much better brand recognition in the long run!

If you post more content about your company and products than destination-related info, you’re doing it wrong.

The Visual Experience

A popular saying is, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Actually, Fred R. Barnard said, “A picture is worth ten thousand words.” Either way, social media is a visual experience and visual content is forty times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content (HubSpot). When you think about it, every social platform centers on visual content.

This is your opportunity to publish the funniest, coolest visual content you can, whether that’s photos, videos, GIFs, memes, and so on. Start producing content that amuses your audience, but remember, there might be a difference between what you like and what your audience likes. Again, test and measure.



If you don’t support your message with a nice visual, you’re doing it wrong.

Opinions Matter

One of the most overlooked aspects of social media is reviews. If there is one thing we know about the Internet, it’s that everyone has a loud virtual mouth. Reviews are a powerful tool and have the potential to help or hurt your brand image in a heartbeat!

So how do we use reviews? Actually, republishing reviews could have a great impact on your audience and makes for some fantastic content. This is what we call user-generated content and is considered by some to be the holy grail of the content world because, well, it’s real and from a trusted source—a reviewer.



There is no better way to build trust than to let your audience tell others how much they love you. A great strategy is to post reviews about a rental AND photos of that rental. You could even use this as a remarketing tactic with paid campaigns.

Speaking of Paid Campaigns

Yes, Facebook is a business. It enjoys collecting our money, too. But do the ads work in the vacation rental industry? Of course they do, but again, more for brand recognition than anything else. We won’t get into the differences in “like” campaigns and “audience” campaigns here, but your ads normally get many more impressions than they do clicks, which is why they’re great for promoting your brand.

Remarketing is probably the best tactic you can use on paid Facebook. It’s simple but effective. Remarketing ads on Facebook are ads that display on their Facebook feed after they have visited your website, attempting to hook them again. Again, think of engaging information here as well, such as reviews, or bringing them back to a page they may have missed.



Does Social Media Help with SEO?

To make a long story short, yes. A strong social media presence with interactions from users does help with search engine optimization. Search engines use “social signals” in their algorithms—yet another reason to have a good audience following. Of course, it’s difficult and time-consuming to be present on ALL social media channels, so at least make sure you keep up with the competition. If you and a competitor are running from a bear, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your competitor.

What Now?

So now you know that social media for the vacation rental industry, whether on Facebook, Pinterest, or Instagram, is about building a trusted brand, not making a sale. It’s about winning over an audience, not pushing them to book. We admit, there are a lot of moving parts when it comes to planning and executing content through your social channels. Writing all those steps down would turn this article into a book.

And don’t get us wrong—there is a place on social media for promoting your rental units, but do it in the paid channel portions, not the regular wall posts.

Just remember, if you use social media as a tool to build your brand as a whole instead of booking units, you’re doing it right.



What You Should Be Doing For Social Media -- TheBare Minimum

*Post three to four times a week to your Facebook Page.
*Post something fun 80 percent of the time and post something promotional 20 percent of the time to increase engagement and reach.
*Respond to your reviews (good and bad) and private messages on Facebook within an hour (a badge on your page displays your response time).
Spend money either remarketing on Facebook or boosting posts.

Great Ideas For Facebook ReMarketing Ads

*Drive users to a page on your website that they may not have seen before, or one that is normally hidden, such as “New Rentals” or “Why we rock as a rental company.
*Use a special Facebook-only coupon code and tease it in the ad to get visitors back to a page that has the coupon (you could also ask them to enter their email address to get the coupon code). Track the code so you know how many bookings you get.

Guest Authored By David Thompson & Paul Hanak. David Thompson is Social Media Director for Intercoastal NE Designs, Paul Hanak is Digital Marketing Director for Intercoastal NE Designs. Follow David Paul on Twitter.




Although social media use is an extremely powerful tool in a marketing arsenal, it is not a cure-all and won’t be a viable source for direct bookings that you can measure.

But it is vital to your brand and your online reputation..
  • Post Crafted By Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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Thursday, April 10, 2025

YOUR Restaurant Social Media Marketing?


How many customers are you actually getting through social media marketing?

If you are a restaurant owner and have invested in social media marketing programs in the past, these phrases from “experts” might sound familiar:

--“I’ll get you a lot of likes on social media!”
--“We’ll help you grow your followers!”
--“We promise you’ll get great exposure!”



What about actual customers, though?

Although these industry “experts” may get your restaurant’s social media pages more likes, followers, and exposure, will this form of social media marketing get you more customers? That is the question.

The sad truth is that many restaurants invest their money in social media programs which don’t actually bring them customers because they’ve been led to believe that organic likes, more followers, and more exposure are the only options for marketing online today.

Now let’s take a second to analyze what most organic social media marketing methods are actually doing for your brand… To learn more, we must take a look at the two top social media platforms:



Facebook and Instagram

--Today, Facebook has 2.23 billion active monthly users with an average engagement rate of 0.17%.
--Instagram has 1 billion active monthly users with an average engagement rate of 2.25%.

These statistics tell us that although these two platforms have billions of users, there are low engagement rates due to the high competition. With Facebook’s ever-changing social hierarchy and algorithm, it has become increasingly difficult for businesses to reach their customers online.

A 0.17% engagement rate on Facebook means that a Facebook business page with 5,000 page likes will only get 85 engagements (likes, comments, etc.) on average. A 2.25% engagement rate on Instagram means that a business page with 5,000 followers will only get 125 engagements on average. Additionally, these low engagement rates across both platforms mainly derive from people who are already familiar with the brand… Reaching NEW customers on social becomes infinitely harder to do.



Posting consistently may be one avenue to re-engage with your current customers and to help your brand look presentable online when people are actively searching for you, but it may not be the best method for attracting new customers to your restaurant.

The next questions you may want to consider in regard to your current social media strategy is: Are your followers close enough in proximity to your restaurant? At what point in your social media strategy do your followers become customers? How do you even track this? The questions above lead me to my next point..

Organic social media marketing methods make it extremely hard to track whether or not your efforts are bringing you NEW customers.

If you can’t track whether the marketing you are doing is effective or not, you can’t trace back to what marketing methods are leading to your success (if you see success), and hence you don’t know where to further allocate your efforts to multiply your successful results.



Call me crazy, but if you invest your time and money into marketing, wouldn’t you want to see a definitive ROI (Return on Investment)?

To address the increasingly lower engagement rates, as mentioned above, many “Social Media Manager Experts” have shifted their efforts towards “boosting” posts. A “boosted” post on Facebook or Instagram is a quick way for your post to reach more “People who like your page and their friends” or “people you choose through targeting”.

Although it may sound like a good idea, boosted posts often lack what most good online ads have, which is: an objective and a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) of success.

As a professional advertiser, I consider effective advertising to have definitive objectives with measurable indicators of success. In Facebook ads manager, you can set objectives such as: clicks, custom conversions, messages, etc. but you can’t do this with a boosted post. Without an objective and KPI, an ad (or boosted post) is a shot in the dark. I call this form of marketing “Hope Marketing.”



I describe “Hope Marketing” as marketing that has no real way of measuring success and therefore is a marketing strategy backed with only “hope and prayer” rather than with data and insights.

In addition to the lack of objectives or KPIs of success, boosted posts do not allow you to “A-B” test different creatives (ads, pictures, videos, etc.) against each other. If you can’t “A-B” test campaigns, you lose the ability to optimize and test different strategies against each other to see which might be yielding better results.

In conclusion, I bring up these points on organic and “boosted” social media strategies because many restaurant owners believe that these are the only social media options for reaching more customers online. If you are a restaurant owner and are wondering why you aren’t growing, I hope this article has brought you some insight.

Guest Authored By Brett Linkletter. Brett is CEO and Co-Founder of MISFIT MEDIA. He is a Restaurant Customer Builder. Follow Brett on X.





Brett Linkletter's Social Media Marketing Takeaways:

--Clearly define your marketing objectives before you start.
--Create a system or KPI that allows you to measure results.
--Test multiple messaging and creative angles against each other.
--Once you have a clearly defined winner, drop the losers and scale the winner.


    • Post Crafted By:
      Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
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    Thursday, March 27, 2025

    YOUR Tangible Social Media Marketing ROI?


    3 Reasons you're not seeing tangible ROI with your social media efforts..



    Not telling your brand story, posting inconsistently and missing out on paid advertising opportunities could sink your brand.

    Today, according to Statista, some 22 percent of the world's population is on Facebook, and a whopping 93 percent of Pinterest users are reaching for their credit cards to make online purchases.

    When people hear these numbers, they don't wait long before they too dive in head-long, eager to have their own slice of the huge pie.

    Typically, they open one social media account after another, in the hopes that one or two platforms will somehow convert and compensate for their overall investment of time and money.



    But is "the more the merrier" approach delivering the desired social media returns?

    Social media success has little to do with the number of profiles you have, the photos you like or the people you follow -- just as the success of your dating life isn't based on how many Tinder profiles you swipe right on.

    With so much content out there and just so much time in the day, the mind-share of the consumer is becoming more and more competitive among brands.

    It is no longer just a numbers game. Quality over quantity will win every time, which all comes down to your content and how you make it resonate with your target audience. So, create content you know your audience wants to see on their feeds. It's not about you or your company; it's about them.



    How an Online Product Could be the Focus of a "Share-Able" Joke

    Just as happens in real life in our efforts to meet that special someone, most of us also go on a blind date with social media: We settle for the "one-night stand" of a few likes and reciprocated follows, then hope to find true love with great returns.

    But true social media success stories are not developed over a night. They are built with strong foundations and strategies in place for sustainable, value-adding content creation that engages with target audiences. Imagine how much more successful you could be on those blind dates if you had your date's entire life history pulled up in front of you to stir conversation, instead of awkwardly sitting there for half the night twiddling your thumbs.

    In today's world, you don't step into the batter's box hoping to hit a home run, you step in with a strategy based on the limitless data at your fingertips, expecting to hit one. Successful content opportunities don't just pop out of thin air into your lap, they are facilitated. If you take the time to understand not only who your target audience members are, but their correlated interests and passions, you'll be on your way to effectively preparing a unique content-creation strategy that will lead you to those returns on social everyone is buzzing about.

    So, if you're not seeing enough returns on your social media efforts, here are three possible reasons why:



    1. Not Telling Your Brand Story

    Stories are powerful, because they engage the mind. If well-scripted, they can attract visitors to your product or service, engage their emotions and get them doing exactly what you want -- without being salesy or downright "in your face."

    If you sell umbrellas, for instance, you could post a picture of your product and say, "Buy this umbrella now." But no one would like that post. However, what if you took a picture of a man opening an umbrella for his date and helping her out of her car? You'd be telling a story that aligns with your product in a way the consumer can relate to: "This month's forecast calls for rain, and lots of it ... and as our fathers used to say, "Always keep protection handy in your car;" you never know when you might need to use it, but she'll appreciate it.'"

    Without directly asking people to buy your umbrella, the picture you paint with words generates the feeling of desire for the umbrella. If you're targeting single men, they'll chuckle at the witty spin on sexual protection and put themselves in the situation most have been in when their date asks, "Do you have an umbrella?" And because the answer is typically "no," next thing, they'll be clicking "Purchase" and sharing the joke with friends.

    Related Article: YOUR Video Content Is King?


    The message? Compelling, brand-optimized stories that your target audience can relate to are key.

    A brand that does this well: Warby Parker doesn't sell just glasses, but fashionable glasses that don't break the bank, especially for the millennial generation. To do this, Warby Parker turns every post on social media into a story, and allows customers to relate and "see" themselves in the product, illustrated by this recent Instagram post showcasing the brand with kids.

    A brand that's missing the mark: Lincoln Motors sorely misses the mark on its marketing, especially in telling stories. Lincoln is not always top of mind in many car-buyers' decision process, in contrast to its parent company, Ford. If class and high-end appeal are Lincoln's goals, storytelling will be how the brand reminds the market it still exists -- and let itself be a consumer's "second thought." In contrast, Ford dominates, because of how its creative team connects with consumers through social strategy efforts.



    2. Not Engaging Consistently

    Consider the expression "Out of sight, out of mind." In that context, any business with a "when I can" approach to engaging online customers will eventually see its brand buried. The reason is that even more crucial than crafting persuasive content is consistent content.

    In the fast-paced social media space, you must consistently push out compelling content (by developing a content marketing strategy and sticking to it).

    The message? If you post content today, then skip several days or weeks before posting the next one, your overall online engagement efforts will fail to deliver desired returns.

    A brand that engages its audience consistently: Look at Wendy's Twitter feed to see how consistent the brand is in engaging with fans. These tweets are the humorous go-to source for laughs, and often get into play "fights" with other brands. All eyes are on Wendy's because it "gets" engaging consistently.



    A brand that's missing the mark: American Airlines had an automatic responder go out on Twitter to all that mentioned the company. But this was a big error because many tweets looked out of place and responded to offensive messages. The automatic responder wasn't doing any favors for the brand, which clearly needed to have a real person engaging the audience.

    3. Missing Out on Paid Advertising Opportunities

    Captivating copy + consistent posting = successful engagement, but are you engaging the right online audience? Facebook, alone, has an impressive 2.2 billion active users daily, but that's just traffic if you're not targeting and generating the right leads (those more likely to buy from you).

    Paid advertising offers a great opportunity to target your ads. For as little as $1 a day, you can advertise effectively and affordably on a platform of choice like Facebook. But 62 percent of small businesses still fail with Facebook Ads. This is because (a) the target audience isn't spending time on Facebook; (b) The business doesn't understand its audience; or (c) The business doesn't have the right hook.



    Again, businesses must tell a story that gets into the heart of the audience, and tell it strategically and consistently.

    To do this, they should take advantage of paid ads on social media. This can result in impressive returns on ad efforts almost immediately.

    The message? If you aren't continually testing new content ideas behind your ads, you will lose to a competitor who is.

    A brand that does a great job with Facebook ads: One of our own advertising success stories centers around the product Gorilla Bow. With creative content, the mix of perfect targeting offered by our Facebook advertising manager together with a team making sure the product was stocked and ready to resulted in a 3.5x return on ad spend, a 350 percent increase in total sales and a 450 percent decrease in cost-per-click.



    A brand missing the mark: This would be any brand on Facebook now that doesn't have an advertising budget. With Facebook's limits on your business page's reach, businesses are left with no "air space" on the Facebook feed. If you have a product or service worth sharing, then paid advertising on Facebook is a must.

    Guest Authored By Colton Bollinger. Colton is the CEO of Jumper Media, which he founded in 2016 to help small businesses tell amazing brand stories on social media -- all day, every day. He brought on two other business-savvy leaders (also long-time friends) after seeing how most small businesses struggle to attract, engage and convert their audiences effectively on social. Today, using cutting-edge social tools and resources, Jumper Media helps over 3,000 businesses (of all shapes and sizes) connect with their target customers predictably and consistently. Follow Colton on Twitter.





    Not telling your brand story, posting inconsistently and missing out on paid advertising opportunities could sink your brand..


      • Post Crafted By:
        Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

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