Gio Palatucci is a social media consultant with over three years experience building personal and big brand profiles online, including National Geographic Traveler. She writes from the crossroads of travel, social media, and tech on her blog: giopalatucci.com
Bryan: While with National Geographic you managed their social media. What type of growth did you see while running their social media campaigns?
Gio Palatucci: In 2011 I was editor of National Geographic Traveler’s Intelligent Travel blog and managed Traveler’s social media pages. During that time we saw tremendous growth in our numbers and engagement. Speaking strictly about numbers, in less than a year we saw our Twitter followers double (to over 300,000), Facebook page likes triple (to over 150,000), and our blog’s monthly pageviews jump. During this growth in followers/fans we also saw the quality of engagement rise-- meaning more retweets, likes, shares, mentions, etc-- which drove more traffic to our site and boosted brand awareness for the travel properties at the Society.
Bryan: How did you do it? Was this the result of one specific campaign, or was it just constant growth?
Gio Palatucci: Traveler’s growth was the result of a constant and focused strategy. Prior to 2011, Traveler simply used an RSS feed to auto-publish new content to Twitter and Facebook. We worked to completely overhaul that strategy and boost our numbers in three specific ways:
- focused and consistent messaging
- diversified content
- targeted audience outreach
The travel brand at the Society spans much wider than just the magazine. We had a robust website (with galleries, lists, and guides), travel books, expeditions, and more that weren’t being shared on our social pages. By widening our content to include all of these different properties-- and delivering it in a way that seemed more personalized, rather than from a robot-- we saw a spike in follower growth. In addition, audience became an important part of our strategy. We began channeling a global voice on Twitter and Facebook to connect with a vast international fan base. We also tapped into pre-existing travel communities on Twitter to expand our reach on that network.
Bryan: How much time do you spend in content creation, compared with actual interaction?
Gio Palatucci: I would say my time is pretty evenly split, but for many people who are managing blogs in addition to their social media pages, time skews toward content creation. I think you need the right balance of content creation, curation, interaction, and engagement to see your social media numbers grow. If you skew too heavily toward content creation (or self-promotion,) for example, you turn people off. However on the other side if your Twitter feed is simply a laundry list of messages and replies, there’s no conversation thread that entices new people to follow your page.
Bryan: How do you feel about automation tools?
Gio Palatucci: I think automation tools can be helpful, but they aren't necessary. You’ll hear many experts say that social media is an art, not a science. I tend to agree. Although some automation tools may succeed in using an algorithm to determine what time of day is best to post or the frequency at which you should be posting, at the end of the day, a poorly written Tweet or Facebook post simply won’t perform well no matter how much it has been "optimized" with these tools. I prefer to use automation tools to monitor feedback and capture data. I like Hootsuite, for example, for tracking retweets and mentions, and Crowdbooster is great for identifying your page’s top influencers. So while these automation tools can be useful, I don’t think they are crucial to success.
Bryan: How do you decide which social networks to use?
Gio Palatucci: When it comes to building your brand online and on social networks you need to first identify what purpose each network will serve. A few questions you should ask yourself before creating a profile are:
- What is my goal for this page?
- What content will I be promoting?
- What is my voice?
- What kind of messaging will I use?
- How will I measure success?
- How much time do I have to manage it?
It’s also important to determine how you will diversify yourself across the various networks. You will quickly lose fans if you are auto-posting the same content to multiple networks. Why should I follow you on Tumblr if I can get all the same content on Facebook at the exact same time? You need to diversify your content and goals on each network to give people a reason to follow you in multiple places.
Bryan: How important is a social media manager, compared to a business owner just doing-it-himself?
Gio Palatucci: A social media manager is extremely important, and I think the deciding factor is time. A business owner has a lot to worry about. Of course he can spend an hour once a day or once a week planning out his posts and return on Friday to see how they all performed-- a strategy that might prove successful for some businesses. But to be extremely successful on these platforms and to engage with your followers, you need to have a social media manager. It’s crucial to have someone who, every minute of every day, has five windows open on her computer seeing what people are saying, responding to questions or criticisms, identifying influencers, etc. A business owner might be able to keep the content fresh but when it comes to building a quality following and doing the nitty gritty engagement work, you need a social media manager to dive deep into that process.
Bryan: What role does an active blog play in the a social media marketing plan?
Gio Palatucci: I think an active blog plays a huge role in social media marketing plans. When I was Nat Geo Traveler, our blog Intelligent Travel was an important communications piece for us. It was how we could come full-circle with engaging prompts or questions we posted to Twitter and Facebook. A lot of social media “gurus” will tell you that a great way to boost engagement is to simply ask questions. But there is little value in launching a question out into cyberspace if you don’t follow through. At Traveler we used our blog to follow up on questions we asked our fans. For example, each Friday we posted to Facebook "Where are you going this weekend?" The following Tuesday, we took the responses and turned them into a photo gallery on our blog called "Where You Went." The benefit to our fans was it let them know we were listening. The benefit to us was that it gave readers a reason to check back in with our blog and Facebook page on a regular basis.
Bryan: What new social network do you feel is worth watching?
Gio Palatucci: Well obviously, Pinterest is the hot, new social media network on the market and you can’t fire up your computer without seeing a new article or blog post about it. Pinterest has made a big splash, but what I think is worth watching is how people are going to start to use it in the travel space. Pinterest is not for self-promotion so it will be interesting to see how folks mold it to fit their needs. A few CVB’s and hotels and bloggers are using it in a unique way for travel planning. So I’ll be watching how that all unfolds.
Gio Palatucci is a social media consultant with over three years experience building personal and big brand profiles online, including National Geographic Traveler. She writes from the crossroads of travel, social media, and tech on her blog: giopalatucci.com
Connect with Gio Palatucci: giopalatucci.com, Twitter: @giopalatucci, Google+ and LinkedIn.
