Building a Social Media Brand
Hal Conick
5/13/2024
It was 2022 when a social media influencer reached out to Courtney Ross with a proposition: I stay at your property in exchange for posting about it on my social media channels.
Many business owners have received similar emails, with some viewing the proposition cynically as being paid in exposure. But Ross had been running Sawgrass Marketing, a vacation rental marketing agency, and knew the power of branding on social media. Perhaps influencer marketing could be the next big way to brand properties in the vacation rental market, she thought.
Ross moved forward cautiously, drawing up an agreement with Megan Nichols, owner of NC Eat & Play, for a stay during a non-peak time of year. Nichols would stay with her family at The Palmetto Place, a cottage Ross and her husband own on Bald Head Island, a car-free island off the coast of North Carolina. In exchange, Nichols would post videos on all her social platforms—she has more than 250,000 followers on Instagram alone—and write a blog post about the cottage on her website.
The results were better than Ross imagined. “We went from having a handful of followers on our social account to now being close to 2,500,” Ross says. “And direct bookings increased. We got four bookings within a month after her stay. I still get new followers and likes to the reel she posted nearly two years later.”
One video of Nichols’s time at Palmetto Place, posted on Facebook, currently has 10,000 views. It shows the cottage, hyping up its amenities and giving viewers a look at some of the breathtaking views of Bald Head Island. In the comments of the video, multiple people tagged their friends and loved ones, egging them on to visit the cottage as a potential vacation destination.
“There’s longevity,” says Ross, who now brokers influencer partnerships for her clients at Sawgrass. “As the influencer’s audience expands and grows, your content resonates with new people. It provides property managers or short-term rental owners with the opportunity to test a new market.”
A Growing Market
Social media, once a way for people to connect with friends and family, has turned into a way for businesses to connect with the world. According to strategy consultant Kepios, there were 5 billion users of social media across the world as of January 2024, which means 62.3% of the world’s population is on at least one social platform.
As people across the planet have opened social media accounts, travel brands on social platforms have influenced where people spend their money and where they travel. According to a 2023 survey from Expedia, 35% of all consumers report that they use social media for travel inspiration. This is a larger percentage than those who look to travel agents, magazines, or TV shows. The importance of using social media grows with younger generations. Expedia reports that 53% of Generation Z travelers look to social media as inspiration for their next travel destination.
Beyond giving ideas for where to travel, social media seems to spark action. A 2023 survey by American Express found that 75% of people traveled to a specific destination after seeing it on social media, while 48% said that they want to travel somewhere that they can show off on their social media platforms.
The short-term vacation rental market can’t afford to overlook the power of social media branding. Whether sharing their story, working with an influencer, or simply engaging with guests, here’s how some industry experts have used social media branding to their advantage.
Finding Your People
A decade ago, Susan Blizzard noticed the power of branding vacation rentals on Facebook. Others were still skeptical of social media’s ability to drive bookings, but Blizzard looked at the attribution path—an analytical view of what brings someone from searching the web to booking a stay—and saw that Facebook seemed to play a sizeable role in bookings.
Facebook is where any vacation rental manager new to social media should start, according to Blizzard, owner of Blizzard Consulting and a member of the VRMA Board of Directors. First, they should set up a Facebook account that can run ads, Blizzard says. Once on Facebook, the most important part is connecting with past guests and those with similar interests, or lookalike audiences.
“Upload your guest list to Facebook,” Blizzard says. “Some emails will be matched—not all of them. But then you can take that little core group of emails and serve ads to lookalikes, those who are similar to your guests. You turn that small group into a much bigger group and market to them.”
Delivering a Consistent Message
While building a follower base, vacation rental managers must think about their branding message. The message is essential, Blizzard says, as it will help vacation rental managers understand how to connect with their audience, making it easier to craft ads and posts that appeal to potential guests.
“Vacation rental managers generally know what brings people to their properties, but the differentiation from other companies is where the message breaks down,” Blizzard says. “Just like with any business, if they really want to get traction, they need to figure out who they’re catering to. Is it families? Is it luxury travelers? Is it people who want to have a low-budget experience? The work to differentiate themselves from the other vacation rental managers is difficult.”
For Tyann Marcink Hammond, owner of Branson Family Retreats and Touch Stay, knowing her target audience means marketing to families who want to stay for events like family reunions. This means catering the social media branding toward amenities like the size of the property, game rooms, and pool tables over the trappings of a romantic getaway, such as hot tubs and wine fridges.
No matter the message, social media must lead guests back to the company’s website where bookings occur, Blizzard says. The potential guest should be clicking toward a place where they can search dates for their stay, turning them from a social follower to a lead.
“Bring it all back to your website,” Blizzard says. “You want them to click to go to your website, because the websites where the bookings take place.”
Solo or Professional?
While some vacation rental managers can successfully run social media on their own, even spending ad dollars to reach a bigger base of potential guests, others are already busy with the full-time job of running a bevy of properties.
If brands want to go beyond the basics—like posting engaging content to TikTok, running more complex campaigns, ensuring long-term consistency and success—Blizzard suggests working with an agency to bolster social media branding.
But before deciding on working with a professional, Blizzard suggests starting small. Make a few posts, see how people respond, and work to refine the branding message. It may not be perfect, but managers can quickly learn what works and what doesn’t by testing different variations of the message and different kinds of content.
Begin with the End Goal in Mind
Since she founded Branson Family Retreats in 2007, Hammond has seen the power of social media as a branding tool. Even before many of the properties were built, she was sharing photos of the acreage where they would build properties in the hopes of engaging with potential guests.
Nearly two decades later, she’s found this approach to be successful, as guests will stay engaged with the brand, liking and commenting on photos and videos, with many eventually visiting for a stay. Those who stay engaged tend to become return guests.
“We’re transparent on social media, because we want to build trust and relationships,” Hammond says. “Ultimately, they’re spending thousands of dollars of their precious vacation on us. We want to make sure that they know exactly what they’re getting, and then surprise them with more.”
For Hammond, social media is a place to build engaging relationships with guests. For other companies, social media may be a place to advertise to new guests or show off properties for people researching their travel on social media.
Vacation rental managers who want to build their brand on social media must start by thinking about their end goal. A question to ask: What does success on social media look like?
In Hammond’s case, success looked like having trusting relationships with guests who would frequently return. This means focusing on engaging people and being an open book in her brand’s social media presence. Hammond says that she shares everything about properties, even when there are issues. Recently, she made a post about construction happening near one property, talking up its amenities but warning guests seeking peace and quiet that now may not be the best time for them at this location.
For others, the end goal may be seeing their time spent on social media turn into conversions, which means measuring return on investment (ROI) through success metrics. Understanding ROI is often more difficult on social media than in traditional marketing campaigns, Blizzard says, as dollars-in, dollars-out aren’t always clear. The platforms play a part in the marketing funnel, but the customer journey usually isn’t as simple as clicking to book straight from Facebook. Even so, Blizzard says that managers who want to track ROI should know what success metrics they want to grow via branding efforts on social media and watch those metrics over time.
“I’m not a fan of measuring clicks; I want revenue,” Blizzard says. “Clicks are directional—they provide some value to understand that people are clicking. But revenue is No. 1.”
Leads are also good to measure, Blizzard says. Managers can track how many people became email subscribers from Facebook, for example, or how many clicked from social to look at open dates to book on the company’s website.
Test What Works
While text and photo posts are a great way to start branding on social media, video is often most engaging for users. In a 2023 report, Sprout Social reported that 66% of consumers find short-form video to be engaging, with images at 61% and live video at 37%. With the rising popularity of TikTok—which grew to between 1.5 and 2 billion users in 2023—vacation rental brands may see even more incentive to experiment with video.
For those who experiment with video, Hammond suggests creating slightly different versions of video for each platform. The algorithms on platforms seem to favor videos created specifically for that platform, she says.
Hammond says that vacation rental managers can give behind-the-scenes looks at properties and businesses by themselves. “I prefer to do the real stuff,” she says. “When we do video tours, it’s me talking and walking through the house. I do it in one take, and I don’t edit it. We keep it very transparent.”
Working with Influencers
After Ross saw success from the influencer visiting her cottage, her own marketing firm began serving as an influencer manager for other brands. She built an application for influencers to see if they’re a good match for her clients.
“We want to make sure that the person we’re partnering with our property managers is going to provide longevity and bring value,” Ross says. “Weeding them out with this application helps. You don’t want a party girl for your luxury mansion. The relationship needs to be reciprocal, so we help property managers identify any red flags with influencer outreach.”
When searching for the right influencer for each brand, Ross also looks for how many followers they have, how the influencers engage with their followers, and how authentic they are when responding to followers. A simple like of each comment is a different kind of engagement from an influencer who responds with personal comments—a more personal touch tends to mean more engagement.
Built into agreements with influencers is when they deliver the content, the type and amount of content they’ll post, and final review of what they post before it goes live. To assess ROI, Ross says that they use the average daily rate for the property as the investment, create a goal for the partnership, and apply that to the goal to each influencer’s project. In most cases, they’ll create a discount code that influencers can give their followers, active for a few weeks to a few months, which makes it easier to track influencer ROI.
Since she started managing partnerships, Ross has seen more success stories, with influencers and brands often becoming partners. One client, Speakeasy Resorts in Texas, worked with an influencer called The Bucket List Latina who continued posting content about her stay and Speakeasy Resorts long after her stay. Ross looks for partnerships like this, which are beneficial for both sides.
Ross said that vacation rental managers looking for an influencer partnership should be diligent in whom they select, perhaps working with an agency to find a good fit and manage the agreement. VRMs can take their time, as influencer marketing isn’t going anywhere. The global influencer market is expected to hit $22.2 billion by next year, according to Statista, and some colleges are even offering classes and majors in influencer marketing.
“All of the big-name hotels have an influencer application at the bottom of their website,” Ross says. “Hilton does it, collecting influencer data for all of their properties. Influencers can pick a hotel and a date range, and if they match with the hotel’s destination and target market, a connection is made. I don’t think that this is going anywhere—it’s only going to expand.”
Using Guest Content
For brands who aren’t quite ready to invest in an influencer, they can find branding success by promoting user-generated content (UGC). UGC is when guests create content—think photos on Instagram, video reviews on TikTok, or positive reviews on Facebook. Brands can share or repurpose the content on their own social media channels.
A report from Ecommerce Platform Notso found that 70% say that UGC highly impacts their purchasing decisions, as it creates trust similar to that of word-of-mouth from a friend.
To get guests to create UGC, brands can ask guests to take photos or write about their stay. They can also incentivize the creation of UGC. Shopify gives many examples of how brands can ask for UGC, including offering a discount for content created, sending post-stay emails to guests, or offering them points within a loyalty program.
The Future of Social Media Branding
With nearly two-thirds of the world on social media—and still growing—branding on social media will likely continue to be effective for years.
Blizzard says that artificial intelligence (AI) will bring massive changes to social media branding. Already, search engine companies like Bing and Google are using AI to improve audience targeting—this will also become a bigger part of social media marketing, she believes.
Ross cautions that while social media and influencer marketing can help appeal to new guests, winning a large amount of new business, vacation rental managers have a duty to protect their local areas. Sometimes, posts and locations go viral and cause a bigger increase in interest than anyone had anticipated. For example, Bali—a popular social media tourism destination—now wants to mitigate against the risk of over-tourism over concerns of environmental damage to the island and its rainforests.
“We want you to be able to succeed, but we also want to make sure that we’re not causing a potential problem for your area,” Ross says. “There’s a fine balance between greater visibility that supports local economies and over-tourism.”
As more travelers continue relying on social media for travel research, Hammond believes that its influence on the vacation rental market will loom large. For those who use it well, this can mean an increase in guests and a big boon for revenue.
“It builds trust when you have a presence on social media,” Hammond says. “And it allows you to continue to engage with your guests and meet future guests.”