Social Media: Does it really have to be this complicated?

Whether you run accommodation, organize tours or even operate a restaurant, your customers are using social media for inspiration long before their trip begins.

They scroll through Instagram and TikTok in the evening, over their morning coffee, on the train to work — or even on the toilet. When the algorithm serves them a video of an exciting destination, they save it or send it to the people they’re planning to travel with.

Social media communicates atmosphere, surroundings and experience better than almost any other medium. A website can tell people about room types, departure times and the services you offer. But through photos, videos and stories on social media, travelers can answer the question that matters most:

Is this the place for me?

Social media isn’t just part of planning the trip. It’s part of the trip itself.

The social media headache

You know your business needs to be on social media. You’ve heard it from experts at conferences, read it in countless articles online and probably even discussed it over coffee with other people in the industry.

And yet, even though you know perfectly well that it matters, somehow the task of keeping your social media channels active can feel overwhelming.

You feel like you don’t have enough time. You don’t know enough. And it doesn’t help that there always seems to be something new being added to the social media pile: new platforms, new content formats, new trends everyone suddenly seems expected to jump on.

The good news is that you’re far from alone.

Social media can feel like a huge undertaking for many tourism businesses, and almost everyone reaches a point where they feel they’re not doing enough.

The even better news is that you don’t need a degree in marketing to change that.

You just need to remember three things:

• Consistency matters more than perfection.

• Maintenance is not the same as growth.

• Planning is your friend.

Consistency matters

While it’s obviously better for your marketing content to be well made, relevant to your customers and visually appealing to your target audience, there’s something else that matters too: publishing regularly.

If you spend your entire advertising budget creating one brilliant ad and have nothing left to actually distribute it, very few potential customers will ever see it.

The same is true on social media. Great content has limited impact if you only post once in a blue moon.

If you want people to remember your business, you need to remind them that you exist. Good-enough content published every week is better than perfect content once every three months.

Or never — because you’re always waiting for the “right” thing to post.

And chances are, you already have plenty of content that is more than good enough.

Photos of breakfast. The view from your rooms. Something funny or unexpected that happens during the day and one of your team happens to photograph. Photos of guests, or from your tours if you’re a tour operator. The Northern Lights. The midnight sun. A small patch of dandelions or buttercups growing beside the entrance to reception.

Photos and videos don’t need to be technically perfect if they capture the atmosphere, create an emotional response or help you tell the story of the experience your guests can expect.

You don’t necessarily need more content.

You just need a system that helps you publish what you already have on a regular basis.

Maintenance is not the same as growth

We tend to think the only way to succeed on social media is to create content that goes viral.

And more often than not, we imagine that this requires expensive equipment, more creative energy than we have left at the end of the day and a professional filmmaker somewhere on the team.

Of course, having someone dedicated specifically to social media will probably help you achieve more. But you can still do a good job without one.

You just need to forget everything you’ve heard about what you “have to” do and redefine what success means for your business.

We find it helpful to divide social media into two approaches: maintenance and growth.

Both have their advantages and disadvantages. The important thing is to choose the approach that is realistic for your business.

Maintenance

You can maintain your social media presence simply by showing regular signs of activity — for example, by publishing one post every week or every month, depending on what is realistic for your business.

The main purpose of the maintenance approach is to reassure people who land on your social media profiles that your business is still active.

It can undermine trust when the most recent post on an account is old and out of date.

With a little thought, your content can also help travelers understand what kind of business you are, what you do and what it feels like to visit you.

The aim of this approach isn’t necessarily to attract huge numbers of new followers, although that may happen. It’s about maintaining visibility, familiarity and credibility.

Growth

If you have more time, budget, knowledge and/or people available, you can create content specifically designed to reach new customers.

We like to think of this as the growth approach.

Here, you create content for a specific target audience with a clear purpose: perhaps to generate interest in a particular experience, drive people to your website or move them closer to making a booking.

This is the content that algorithms — or paid advertising — put in front of the traveler scrolling on their phone while half-watching TV.

Instead of simply being there when someone happens to find your profile, you create TikToks, Reels, Stories and carousel posts designed to bring the right people to you.

Choose what fits your business

If social media feels overwhelming or intimidating — as it often does for many managers of small and medium-sized tourism businesses — the growth approach may not be right for you.

It requires time, money, social media knowledge and a willingness to experiment. That isn’t realistic for everyone.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t maintain a good social media presence, or that maintenance isn’t worthwhile.

It’s also worth remembering that maintenance and growth don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You might focus on maintenance for most of the year, then run more proactive campaigns around important booking periods, new products or special offers.

The important thing is to choose an approach that suits you and your business. Not what you wish you could do. Not what everyone tells you that you should be doing.

What is actually realistic for you today.

Planning is your friend

Running a tourism business requires all kinds of planning.

You need to organize staff shifts, keep availability up to date in your booking system, and order food and other supplies in time. Without some kind of planning, rooms would get double-booked and guests would turn up for glacier walks and horse-riding tours at all hours of the day and night.

Hungry, because someone forgot to order breakfast.

And yet, when it comes to social media, we somehow expect ourselves to simply “remember to post” whenever inspiration strikes.

Then peak season arrives and suddenly you realize you haven’t published a single post in three months.

The best way to maintain a consistent social media presence is to plan ahead. And the easiest way to plan ahead is to use a system, such as the Keeps social media tool.

Most people who work professionally with social media set aside dedicated time to create content. This is often called content batching: creating several pieces of content in one sitting.

It might be a full day, a few hours or an evening. The important thing is to block out time in your calendar specifically for content creation.That way, it doesn’t get forgotten. Ideas also tend to come more easily when you focus on one task at a time, and the whole process becomes much more efficient.

Once the content is ready, you can schedule it in advance.

Scheduling simply means choosing the date and time you want a post to go live, and letting the system publish it automatically to your social media channels.

With the Keeps social media tool you can choose the date and time your post should be posted. You can organize your content up to a year in advance.

The Keeps social media tool takes this one step further by helping you write captions for your photos and videos and choose suitable hashtags.

Make the content creation process easier with the help of AI caption suggestions. The AI reads your image and creates an approriate caption. You can also write your own caption and get help from the AI to polish it.

All you need to do is select an image, decide where and when you want to publish it, and use the caption the system helped you create.

It doesn't have to be this complicated

It’s easy to make social media marketing feel more complicated than it needs to be. There are certainly plenty of things you could think about, but every business should be able to maintain a basic, consistent presence.

All you really need is some planning and a system to work with.

One short walk around your property or local area, for example, could give you photos and videos for several different posts. You could show the view. The surroundings. A walking route. A nearby point of interest. Or simply a small detail that captures what the place feels like.

One walk. A whole month of content.

The social media tool is included in the Core standard Keeps subscription.

With a Core+ subscription, the Keeps team can take care of your social media maintenance for you.