As more and more people add vacation rentals to their options for planning a trip, it’s important for hosts and owners to use every channel available to them to build awareness (and excitement) for their STR. Social media, and the organic traffic it can generate, is a good and persistent way to put forward your properties.
Choose Your Platforms
Just as it’s impossible in your personal or professional lives to be active on every social media platform, it’s not practical to try to cover every base for your STR. Choose two, maybe three platforms at the most where you are going to tell your story.
While YouTube has such power as a secondary search engine, people forget that it’s a social media platform as well (perhaps the most powerful one) as many previously unknown people and companies have made fortunes on it. YouTube should definitely be in the conversation for one of the platforms you consider for social media.
Then you’re left with Instagram, Facebook, and the plucky and controversial TikTok as options for others you would use to complement YouTube.
Choose Your Niche
The niche you are chasing will play into which platforms you choose. Niches could include couples, families, remote workers, or even those obsessed with a particular destination.
Those who are destination-obsessed will probably be hunting on Instagram. Remote workers may rely on tips from others in Facebook groups. TikTok may be a backdoor entry to families through younger kids who find your videos.
Make a Plan
The niche you choose will inform the type of content you create and when and how often you post. To be clear, you don’t need to post every single day in order to win in social media for your vacation rental. It’s about consistency more than anything, and that can be posting once a week even.
As part of your plan you are going to want to use hashtags and geotags to attract people browsing along those lines.
What to Post?
As a consumer of social media, you probably know there are infinite stories about pretty much any topic. When it comes to your STR, that can include:
- Stories about the property
- Stories about you
- Stories about the neighborhood
Going one step further in stories about the neighborhood, imagine featuring a favorite coffee shop or restaurant. The owner would be glad to have some free organic content about his/her business, and you get a chance to highlight something that would be available to your guests.
Stories about the property could involve guests, whether they share something they enjoyed doing while staying at your place or even doing a video testimonial for future guests (feel free to offer incentives like cookies for kindness like this from your guests). Hey, you could even involve your MaidThis cleaning crew, though we can’t promise we’ll be able to do any fancy dance moves for the TikTok of your dreams.
Other stories about the property or about you could come in collaboration with local social media content creators or micro-celebrities who might be willing to visit (or stay) at your property and feature it in their feeds. They can tag you, you can tag them, and more people get reached.
Finally, don’t forget the most important rule in social media posting: reusing! A blog post can also be the basis of a YouTube video, an Instagram story, or a Facebook post. Just remember to adapt the message to the platform and you’ll have enough publicity out there to drive even more interest in your listings which can translate into more revenue, making the time you spend on the social media promotion worthwhile.
This content originally appeared in our twice-monthly Guest Book Newsletter.
