If your social media accounts disappeared tomorrow, would anyone miss them? I ask our team this question every year, not to challenge their work, but to assess whether we’re adding value for our audience. The brands that succeed on social media offer inspiration, education, or a genuine sense of community. They provide leadership when the world feels off course, and levity when it feels too heavy.
A strong brand should be uniquely positioned to offer a distinct perspective or value for their audience, like providing expertise or teaching a new skill. At Intrepid Travel, we think about value creation in three ways.
1. Does our audience feel inspired to travel the world through a more local lens?
2. Did they learn about a new experience, dish, or destination?
3. Did they learn how to travel responsibly?
If our audience answers yes to any of these questions, we know we’re creating value.
Encourage participation
Last year we added a fourth value proposition: does our audience feel part of a community? It is arguably the most powerful pillar in a world where people grappling with loneliness and isolation often use social media to create a sense of belonging and connection.
The challenge with creating a sense of community is that social media teams are largely set up to produce a high volume of owned content. They become a distribution channel for multiple departments and a pipeline of projects and product launches. Most brands are optimizing for output rather than participation.
When we began looked at how we could create a better sense of connection, turn followers into fans, and optimize participation, we realized we needed to rethink our social media strategy. We made these four changes.
1. Create a dedicated social content team
In the past our social media team was responsible for everything from creative to caption writing to community moderation and customer service. Now our social team is solely focused on production and posting across our owned channels. The core objective for these roles is to work within our core content pillars and ensure we have a strong social output 365 days of the year, guaranteeing every piece of content creates value for our audience while driving business outcomes. This is the core objective of most social teams, ours included, and it’s important that we provided dedicated roles and budgets to focus on this space.
2. Encourage customers to share content about us
This unlocked a plethora of content for us. Rather focus only on content created by us, we focused on content about us. As one of the largest adventure travel companies in the world, we run 1,000 trips in over 100 countries, everything from safaris in East Africa, to food tours in Italy and treks in Patagonia. Our trips are deeply shareable, but travellers weren’t tagging Intrepid or telling their family and friends they were on an Intrepid trip because we weren’t connecting the dots between our customers and our social media team. More than 95% of people on our trips weren’t tagging Intrepid on their posts, while anecdotally we know almost all of them share their travel experiences on social. That was a gap we needed to close.
3. Create a community manager role
We hired a two-person community team under our head of social and community to focus on two primary community groups—our customers and our internal creators. Our social media manager leads the content created by us, and our community manager leads content about us. Simply asking customers to tag Intrepid Travel when they post on social media made a difference. The community manager ramped up social moderation and built a program that incentivized travellers to share their experiences on social. Each month we give away a trip anywhere in the world to one random traveller who tags us.
This year we are on track to have over 10,000 posts by our customers about Intrepid. This matters because word-of-mouth drives at least 20 percent of our direct customer acquisition. Intrepid customers know other Intrepid customers, and when they share their experiences, it becomes low-cost marketing to highly qualified customers. Plus, consumers trust content by people more than traditional advertising. With social and community working in concert, we can drive much stronger outcomes for the business.
4. Be the facilitator not the focus
Community is something you foster, not force. Creating a community team brought us closer to our customers by ensuring every comment is responded to. We not only like customers’ posts and messages. We also engage with them to create a sense of belonging.
One of our travellers, who lives in Tasmania, Australia, but has travelled all over the world with Intrepid created a Facebook group that has grown to over 8,000 travellers. The magic of this space is that it isn’t run by us; it is run by Intrepid travellers for Intrepid travellers. We have developed a strong relationship with the group’s founders and administrators. We also have a private Facebook group where we offer trip giveaways and early access to trip releases. The group gives us tons of actionable insights and creates a genuine space for connection on our customers’ terms, not ours.
Final thoughts
Social media is in constant flux. It’s noisy and crowded, and increasingly hard to not only attract an audience but to keep it. While gaining attention is hard to achieve, creating a sense of belonging is arguably harder. We see the profound impact of community every day, both in customer engagement and business performance. We still focus on the posts by us, but increasingly, we also measure our success by the posts about us. They offer critical proof, word-of-mouth, and help grow our brand through the customers we’ve worked so hard to acquire.
Social and community are powerful drivers of growth when they work in concert. And if our social channels disappeared tomorrow, I do believe people would miss them. But these days, I believe our customers would continue the conversation without us. To me, that is the ultimate benchmark of not only social success, but community success.
Mikey Sadowski is vice president of global communications at Intrepid Travel.