1. Introduction

Social media, by definition, is an internet-based platform such as applications and websites that work on a model of user-generated content and enables users to add, share and propagate their own content (Ngai, Tao, & Moon, 2015). Social media has emerged in the last two decades and has placed itself in a hub position within the marketing mix of contemporary businesses. According to Holt (2016), businesses tend to use social media marketing for various functions including getting valuable insight into the target audience, specific targeting, and digital marketing. Social media of various forms and types have evolved over time. The most famous of them is Facebook with a worldwide user base of 2271 Million users, followed by YouTube with a user base of 1900 Million, Instagram with 1000 Million users furthermore, there are smaller ones like Twitter.

Social media is for individual to share their experiences with the world. This specific feature and independent empowerment through social media allows it to thrive. Users motivated to get their message out to the world can generate own content, socialize and interact. Nevertheless, this makes social media a valuable source of insight and data that is used by brands and businesses to design offerings and target specifically the audience they consider potential customers. Similarly, this platform can inspire individuals to achieve more and become entrepreneurs or influencers within their area of expertise. The empowering nature of the platform has empowered individual and successfully becoming an important aspect of their lives.

The following report deals with analyzing the effectiveness of social media platforms in the achievement of personal cum professional objectives. The first part of the report provides a detailed account of the chosen social media platform. The next section provides details to the professional objectives which is being achieved using the digital marketing on social media. The report further states the activities performed on the social media to achieve the goal. The final section deals with the reflection on the activities performed and the extent to which the objective that was being set, is achieved.

2. The Media Chosen- Instagram

The chosen media is the Instagram. Since the social media account is related to travel depicting places I have personally seen and experienced. According to Alrawadieh, Dincer, Istanbullu Dincer, and Mammadova (2018) suggests that major travel bloggers, travel companies and travel loggers are promoting their business profiles through the Instagram. De, Maity, Goel, Shitole, and Bhattacharya (2017) adds that Instagram has recently emerged as a good platform for achieving personal or professional popularity goals. Individuals use this medium to get their messages across in an engaging manner.

Since the profile required sharing photos of places hence primary reason to select Instagram was it has a layout effectively handles photo content. Moreover, content with pictures was easy to curate in an aesthetically appealing way. The next reason was to unlock emerging trend of Instagram influencers who can influence people life towards positive change. Since, I had to promote my profile named Solotraveller_C I had to keep adding new and exciting stuff such as stories, live video feeds of amazing places while interacting with customers. About 400 million users are active monthly and the penetration of Instagram is going strong where user base is increase 4 time each year. This makes Instagram ideal for the use in digital marketing and customer engagement programs.

When I approach this platform, I see myself as an entrepreneur in travel blogging Instagram is a very powerful medium that offers separate settings for business profiles where the business can leverage free basic analytics such as reach by geography, peak engagement time of the audience and sorting of audience by basic demographics such as the age, gender and the time of use etc. so I could understand how my blog is being viewed by audience. Hence due to all reasons stated above, I have decided to choose Instagram as the social media platform where activities to achieve professional objectives would be conducted.

3. The Objective

As I finalized the platform I was going to use to promote Solotraveller_C account, I searched and reflected on many strategic objectives. The most important of it was the objective to generate and build audience and bring them to one platform to interact. As the travelling company’s most potential customers are the adults. The objective was to engage more audience and gain followers and have interactive discussions with other travel enthusiasts while sharing my experience for the benefit of the world. The initial approach with the process was to gain more followers but it came to my notice that Instagram accounts with fairly large number of followers can still be unprofitable. It became evident that instead of pursuing for increasing followers, the goal should be to engage people and motivate them to fulfill their travel desires. I can become a travel influencer where people can learn and get inspired of my experiences. Moreover, this would happen when people interact on my page and ask for information about the travel tour and packages. Eventually, I can become a connection for those travel enthusiasts to connect with right business and using my influence I can earn from marketing travel related facilities on my page.

The goal therefore has been set to achieve increasing interaction from the current followers and develop a strong relationship with all followers govern by mutual trust and respect. The goal is to develop engaging content that encourages interaction amongst existing followers and has the potential to attract potential followers in the extended circle of existing followers.  The more people share the content on my page has help them in having a great travel experience would result in increasing positive engagement. This would also invite more businesses to associate with my blog hence increasing the popularity by 50%.

The goal from extensive and meaningful content creation is to create awareness, build customer base and market potential service providers to generate revenues for myself. Another important dimension of the goal is to transform my page in a more personal outlook than being a business outlook that would help in interacting with the consumers in real senses.

To achieve this professional objective. I have designed a plan of engagements based on stories and posts to attract the customers to visit the Instagram page. This also includes some competitions and travel logs that the customers enjoy.

3.1 Measure of Engagement

Measuring engagement is of time importance to the achievement of the objective. To measure the engagement, I have applied the technology of built in analytics to monitor visitor’s activities. The Instagram offers in built analytics’ in for entrepreneurial/professional profiles that help track the reach and activities such as likes, comments and saves. The stories in Instagram also track the number of visitors that were attracted because of that story and also mention who have taken any actions.

4. Account of Activities

The following section described the set of activities that I conducted in order to achieve my goal of maximizing engagement and increasing customer’s interest in my consultancy regarding their travel plans. The plan was stretched over 4 weeks with each week having small goal that eventually lead to the overall attainment of the business level goal.

4.1 Activity Carried out in Week 1

The goal of the first week was to attain a good number of followers who are active and potential enthusiasts of my travel blog. I started off by the building the professional profile representing my travel diaries. I was planning to use Instagram solely to develop my goals and achieve plan outcomes. To begin my travel blog activity, I posted my first travel experience with picture and used relevant hashtags to gain followers. I researched about popular hashtags that are common in the friend of travelling and then used them to gain followers on my Instagram account.

I next initiated a tactic in which I uploaded a beautiful travel log and asked people in the caption to tag people who they want to go and visit this place with. The post was followed by number of stories over the week and people were encouraged to tag their loved ones in the comments. This created a good basic engagement and bought the post up in the Instagram algorithms. The post got some comments and 17 likes which was a good start. However, my page didn’t get new followers, the number was low but as the Instagram is getting saturated, it was not a very bad number. I posted frequently about (15 posts) and used the insight to check on the time my post appropriate audience is active. For example, the engagement on my first post indicated that the appropriate time for posting is around 7:00 PM because this time most of my population is active. I then posted the Next post right at that time and the increase in engagement was evident.

4.2 Activity Carried Out in Week 2

The goal of this week was to establish an engagement basis and enhance the probability of customers talking about the posts and sharing their experiences. The goal was to increase at least 25 engagements, about 10 followers, and a 20% increase in reach. However, in reality, I was able to gain 20 engagements and still no actual followers. The aim of increasing the was designed so that more and more people could see my posts and get to know about my tour experiences. I got some high-resolution pictures that were taken when I was traveling and taking pictures with my high res DSLR camera. I put up engaging content and directed them in using phrases like “Get to read their travel story at the link in Bio” research by Terttunen (2017) indicated that people who are planning a visit would most probably look for testimonials and visit logs. The post was done on Monday at 7: PM and the engagement were evident. Many people also visited the link indicating that people are interested in such posts. I created only 4 high-level posts to keep the quality of the content high. Up till now, I am unable to translate in developing and gaining followers. Engagement is most important in growing the account and the business so my focus was on posting engaging content that would engage the tourists/travel enthusiasts and urge them to visit the profile.  The post engagement was enhanced and people also sent direct messages. The queries generated showed that the followers are taking keen interests in what I was doing however I was not yet achieving the targets.

4.3 Activity of Week 3

In the third week, the goal was to establish one to one interaction with the tourists and travel enthusiasts. I was very positive for the content I am creating can possibly generate 50+ followers however, I was only able to increase followers to 18 and increase engagement by 8. Here, I wanted to see how much I can inspire individuals to share their experiences.  I posted a story with a live question port stating, “Where do you want to go next?”  The post was up for 24 hours and the engagement could be seen. I used Travel hashtags but wasn’t able to reach a very high number but it was on satisfactory grounds since I was not fully accustomed to using the platform. Nevertheless, the post was adopted and many people replied with their dream destinations and other planned trips.

4.4 Activity Carried Out in Week 4

The goal of week four I was able to further extend my audience and increase engagement by 15%. By now the people were asking me to write a review on different places and tour service providers to help them in their decision making. A few but people were interested in my opinion hence I decided to review the services I had used personally to let them know was my experience. Moreover, I encouraged other people to talk about their experiences in comments to allow knowledge sharing on the platform. The ultimate target was to get attention of businesses operating in tourism industry to use my blog as a medium for their advertisement. I personally got in touch with few businesses and asked them to collaborate with me and offer my followers special discount. I believed that such a promotional content if hosted by my website would lend an immediate boost and would assist me to gain better audience. At the end of week 4 I was recommending people and was receiving feedback on how effective have been my suggestions to the community.

5. Industry Best Practice

            Research suggest that travelling industry works on building strong clientage. Travelling industry relies strongly on word of mouth and cross promotions with various brands. To be established in the travelling industry it is vital to interact with customers on a one to one basis and the reinforce brand identity (Chung & Koo, 2015). That is why the best strategy is to operate Instagram account and interact on one to one basis, offer discounts, gain direct insight, see major trends, offer holiday discounts and arrange events such as open days. According to Kiráľová and Pavlíčeka (2015) the account is also used by multiple travel bloggers that can be a significant source of marketing material these bloggers can act as brand ambassadors and provide good marketing force. Travel industry has recently started incorporating bloggers as a significant part of their Public relation efforts. The industry best practices suggest that the companies are increasingly focusing on content based reminders for website. All content on the website is not paid or only related to sale, some information’s and blogs about various travel aspects need to be put up on website so that the website is interesting and exciting as well as informative. Apart from this industry travel agencies are focusing more on generating Virtual reality content that provides customers close to reality experience and help them select the travel package they like (Öz, 2015).  This includes VR trips to different destinations, experience hotels and amenities included in the package and other etc.

6. Reflection

The Following section provides the reflection of activities that are I have done in the past 4 weeks on my chosen social media which was the Instagram. The report presents an account of what I have earned during the activities about social media and its viability in achieving various objectives. The framework that I am going to use is given by Gibbs.

6.1 Description of The Task

The firsts step in the reflective cycle was the description of the task performed on which the reflection is given. The tasks were to achieve a professional goal of creating awareness regarding the travelling by sharing personal experiences. I was able to engage customers on the platform to generate enough traffic to create value for the marketer to use my profile as a medium for advertising travel services.

I learnt that for marketers the attractive forum is the one that has most followers and they can have most exposure with the dollar amount they spent. What more I learnt was people would only engage with the content if it is created after empathizing with them properly. This means that content must represent the audience rather than just delivering information.  I choose Instagram after a thorough research on consumer analytics and by the taking into consideration important factors such as my target audience availability on social media and viability as industry’s best practice. What I learnt from the experience was that people love Instagram’s content however, if I had supported by content and posts with videos I could have had used the platform in an optimum level.

6.2 Feeling

Initially I was feeling confused because I had no previous experience on Instagram specially with the professional profile but then after the first post and watching tutorials on consumer analytics, I Felt confident on my skills that I can make good impact on Instagram, I felt happy when people interacted with my post and I knew I had to understand the system even better to actually unlock the value. I learned that in these media, research plays vital role in developing the confidence, it is very important to research and use appropriate content style to succeed in social media marketing. When I was able to unlock followers, I felt accomplished however I felt that I could have had done better by creating more engaging and user focused content.

6.3 Evaluation

Overall the activity was very successful and reached out a goof amount of people and created awareness about my business I have a positive outlook towards using business profile of Instagram as a tool to engage and interact with customers and provide them with one to one perceived inclusions. Also, it was a positive step because it provides helpful insight on one to one basis as well. However, maintaining a strong social media presence requires people to work continuously in creating engaging content and reply to each comment/query individually. At the same time, fun element is also very important, which creates pressure for being creative and having good personal skill.

7. Conclusion

Final verdict about the activity is that I have learned the importance of making a strong social media presence for brands. People are highly influenced by the brands content on social media and the opinion leaders that have developed over time influence the purchase behavior is impacted. Hence it is very important to choose the media wisely and interact in the most appropriate way to gain followers and create professional awareness. This is also very helpful to generate leads which is very difficult in social media only module. Hence overall, I learned that social media presence and well research background information is necessary to succeed in online travel industry.

7.1 Action

The learning I gained, I would translate it to research and connect with people and understand what type of information they actually want to read. I would also not only present the content in limited readable format rather I would create dynamic video content for reach tour enthusiasts in a more dynamic way. Furthermore, I would design a process map for my posts and how would I engage audience. This would include when and how I have to share content and reply to user queries. I would try to educate consumer to actually read and explore beforehand on what they will actually experience.

References

Alrawadieh, Z., Dincer, M. Z., Istanbullu Dincer, F., & Mammadova, P. (2018). Understanding destination image from the perspective of Western travel bloggers: the case of Istanbul. International Journal of Culture, Tourism and Hospitality Research, 12(2), 198-212 %@ 1750-6182.

Chung, N., & Koo, C. (2015). The use of social media in travel information search. Telematics and Informatics, 32(2), 215-229 %@ 0736-5853.

De, S., Maity, A., Goel, V., Shitole, S., & Bhattacharya, A. (2017). Predicting the popularity of instagram posts for a lifestyle magazine using deep learning.

Holt, D. (2016). Branding in the age of social media. Harvard Business Review, 94(3), 13 %@ 0017-8012.

Kiráľová, A., & Pavlíčeka, A. (2015). Development of social media strategies in tourism destination. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 175, 358-366 %@ 1877-0428.

Ngai, E. W. T., Tao, S. S. C., & Moon, K. K. L. (2015). Social media research: Theories, constructs, and conceptual frameworks. International Journal of Information Management, 35(1), 33-44.

Öz, M. (2015). Social media utilization of tourists for travel-related purposes. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 27(5), 1003-1023 %@ 0959-6119.

Terttunen, A. (2017). The influence of Instagram on consumers’ travel planning and destination choice.