Vacation Rental Marketing: How to Automate Social Media Marketing

No doubt, many social media managers are still on the brink about the effectiveness and ROI of spending time creating content and managing numerous social media accounts. If my previous blog post, Vacation Rental Marketing: 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Ignore Social Media, still didn’t convince you of the importance of being active on social media, I am pretty certain this blog post will. Why? Because it shows you just how little time you have to invest when creating social media content.

Marketing professionals love automation tools! It helps us avoid wasting precious time fussing over mindless repetitive tasks. As much as I love these tools, I love sharing these tools with vacation rental managers even more. This post will dive into a few awesome tools that you can use to save time, and will also outline a few pointers as to how often you should post on social media and what kind of content you should post:

Consistency: Automating the Frequency of Posting

In order to be effective in social media, you will need to post regularly and consistently. Just like real-life social networking has its unspoken rules, so does social media. You cannot post a big bunch of content for two weeks and then go silent for 4 weeks. Apply real-life rules to social media, just like you cannot act extremely social for the first half of a cocktail and stand in the corner not talking at all for the second half, you need to provide consistency. Know your limits and post regularly within those limits. You do not need to post 5 times a day, maybe 3 times a week is all you can handle, so set your goal to be posting just that.

Searching for content to post may not be feasible to do everyday. Maybe once a week you can set aside an hour or two to search for quality content that your readers would enjoy.

Once you have found the content you can use automation tools to schedule them to be posted frequently in the future. For Twitter, I highly suggest using Hootsuite, which allows you to schedule posts for the future. For Facebook, you can use Pages’ schedule feature to have your posts appear live in a future date.

In order to provide excellent customer service and to understand the needs of your target market, you can listen-in on users’ online discussions about vacations, vacation homes and hotels. Due to it’s open nature, Twitter is the best listening tool. You can set-up search parameters through Hootsuite or Social Bro. You should aim at listening to activities around Vacations, Holidays, Vacation Rentals, Holidays in your City as well as your own brand name.

Content:Automating Content Search

One of the most time consuming aspects of vacation rental marketing is finding quality content that your users would find interesting. Determine a content strategy; will you post content about your local area or are you going to focus on global travel articles, or both. Once you have determined the content types you would like to share, it’s time to find this content. Instead of searching for travel articles on search engines, you should use Online Reader tools, such as Feedly, that allow you to follow popular blogs, new websites and topics, which it will aggregate on a single page for you.

Reaching The Right Audience:

Automating Best Time to Post & Searching For Followers

The real-time nature of Twitter and Facebook news-feeds means that if you post when the user is not online, your posts might just get lost among other tweets and Facebook status updates. Instead of spending countless hours experimenting with the best time to post, you can use social media tools such as Social Bro. Social Bro connects to your Twitter account, analyses your users’ behaviour and tweets, and suggests the best time to post/schedule your tweets.

Best of all, Social Bro allows you to find targeted followers, who are very likely to follow you back. Search and track industry influencers as well as those who love to travel and would appreciate your tweets. I hope this post helps you to cut down the time it takes to be a social media superstar. As always, remember social media is not a direct sales channel, it is where you can build your brand and provide useful and shareable content.

If you use any other social media automation tool, please feel free to share it with us in the comment section below!

About the Author:

Francesca_nurlu Francesca Nurlu is the Digital Marketing Manager for Kigo Vacation Rental Software. Kigo provides all-in-one vacation rental software and channel management solutions for vacation rental managers. If you are in the market for a reservation system or vacation rental website, be sure to visit Kigo’s website: http://kigo.net