Facebook Photo gallery: show expertise

Photo gallery: show expertise

Your Facebook photo gallery can reinforce your expertise and experience. You can use it to create albums of trips you’ve taken, demonstrating that you are indeed well-traveled and know what you’re talking about.

Sophie Bujold

But don’t use too many photos. Looking at someone else’s photo album can get boring quickly. “Choose no more than eight to 10 of your most interesting photos to post at once, or post images in small groups of two to three over a period of time,” Bujold recommended. 

Be sure to include a few funny, cute or people-focused photos, in addition to beautiful landscapes. And give all your photos captions. 

If your agency has more than one travel counselor, create an album showing your agents, with their names, traveling to various places. This demonstrates that your team is well-traveled. 

To encourage interactivity, suggest to clients that they post photos of trips you’ve sent them on. Then post a comment when they do.

Photo strip: a marketing tool
The most obvious use of the photo strip is to show examples of the photos in your photo gallery, but you can also use the space for marketing. 

On her Facebook photo strip, Bujold shows only the icons of different social media platforms, thus reinforcing her message that she is an expert in social media. She prevents other images from appearing on the photo strip by only tagging those five social media icons with her Facebook page name. Any other images she uploads go untagged. 

Some agencies put promotional ads in the photo strip. This does require some design skill as it involves creating graphic images similar to Facebook ads, Bujold said.

“I’ve seen graphics with words in it, for example, ‘Save $300.’ When you click on the image, you see the picture and the caption. They use that caption as their promotional space, explaining what the promotion is and how to get it.”

News feeds: yours & theirs
There are two news feeds you need to think about, Bujold said: 1) the feeds of the people who like you, since the news feed is where they see the updates, photos and videos that you upload, and 2) your news feed, which comprises the updates, photos and videos of companies that you (as a business) have liked.

It’s their news feed that counts
Your likers’ news feeds are critically important. This is where they stay up to date with you. If your posts are not making it into their news feeds, you may as well not exist on Facebook. 

Unless you’re interacting regularly with the people who have liked you, you can’t be guaranteed that they’re seeing your posts on their news feeds.

Gaining news feed visibility 
When viewing their news feeds, most users see the news that Facebook determines is most relevant to them. It’s critical, therefore, that your posts qualify as top news. 

(Facebook users can opt to view all posts on a news feed, with the most recent listed first. But most don’t realize this is a choice and so only view top news posts.)

Here’s Bujold’s advice for making sure you appear in other people’s news feeds.

•    Post regularly so Facebook sees that you have frequent, timely updates. For most businesses, posting once or twice a day will work. “It’s enough to be visible, but not too often to scare off likers,” Bujold said. Post less often and your ranking will start to drop.
 
•    Vary your content to include photos, videos, links and Facebook questions, in addition to plain text updates. If you update twice or more a day, only update in plain text once.

•    Include content that is funny or that prompts opinions, as these keep engagement high. Think on an emotional level rather than on a business marketing level, Bujold suggested.

•    Ask questions and request likes or comments to encourage likers to participate and contribute, which keeps their affinity to your page high. 

•    If you’ve got a marketing budget, use contests and giveaways to drive participation. 

“The important things is to keep them talking or liking past the initial action of liking your page,” Bujold said.

Your news feed
Your agency’s news feed is essentially a monitoring dashboard, Bujold said. 

Use your business’ news feed to keep up to date with destinations, preferred suppliers and other companies you do business with. You can also use the news feed to network with other travel agencies. 

Events page: stir anticipation
If you are a group specialist, Bujold suggested using the events pages both to promote your groups and to rouse excitement about an upcoming trip.
 
“I have a client that does medical cruises. He creates an event page for every cruise and invites the passengers from that cruise to post photos and talk about the event on that page.”

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