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Marketing your short term vacation rentals on social media is an essential way to increase visibility and attract potential guests. Social media management can be difficult, but when done right, it can be an essential piece of your vacation rental management business’s online presence. Social media platforms offer a unique opportunity to connect with your audience by:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Instilling trust in your brand
- Showcasing vacation rental properties
- Driving traffic to your website
- Sharing local news and events
- Kickstarting a positive guest experience
However, not all social platforms are created equal when it comes to promoting your vacation rental management business. Review the platforms’ different advertising capabilities and consider your target audience and types of content they interact with to decide which social media platform works best for your business.
Reaching your Audience
There are two ways to reach your desired audience on social media: paid and organic content. Paid content is advertising created within each platform’s ad management portal to create brand awareness and drive traffic to your website. Organic content is posted directly into the platform and relies on interaction to drive more reach and results.
Let’s delve into the top social media platforms for vacation rental management companies and determine which platform is the best fit for your vacation rental marketing strategy.
Introducing the Best Social Media Platforms for Vacation Rentals
Choosing the right social media platform is crucial for maximizing your vacation rental company’s online presence. Each platform offers unique features and caters to different demographics. Let’s take a look at our top 3 social media platforms.
Facebook continues to be the leading platform used by marketers worldwide (89%) because it is a viable social media platform for both organic posting and paid advertising and boasts the largest social network audience (~3.06 Billion monthly users).
Thanks to the Meta Business Suite, social media managers can schedule posts and reels, reply to comments and direct messages, and analyze insights all in one platform.
Avoid daily posts showcasing your properties. They are important to feature occasionally, but your audience will lose interest if you post the same type of content every day. Instead, act like a tour guide and focus on what makes your local area worth visiting. Capture your audience’s interest by highlighting upcoming events, local businesses, and stunning scenery. Everyone loves seeing a beautiful sunrise that transports them to their dream vacation spot!
The Ads Manager platform also gives advertisers the power to design, publish, and monitor advertising campaigns. The Meta Audience Network, which spans both Instagram and Facebook, can place ads in over 20 locations across the mobile and desktop versions of each platform. Meta’s various ads formats all perform best when they include eye-catching design, engaging copy, and a call-to-action (CTA) that drives traffic to your website or a variety of other conversions.
Instagram, Facebook’s visually-focused little sibling, is the second most-used platform by marketers worldwide (80%). With its visually-driven interface, Instagram is tailor-made for showcasing stunning images and videos of vacation properties. Instagram’s robust engagement features such as Stories, Reels, and IGTV provide ample opportunities for immersive storytelling and direct organic interaction with potential guests.
Instagram’s inclusion in the Meta Audience Network makes it an easy addition to your existing social media marketing strategy if you are currently using Facebook.
Action Item: Create and add an Instagram profile to your Meta Business Suite to post organic content, place ads across the Instagram platform, and analyze paid and organic metrics.
It’s official – Pinners have wanderlust! Weekly Pinterest users are 26% more likely to be interested in travel compared to non-users (Pinterest, 2023). This vacation-minded audience also uses Pinterest differently than other social media platforms. Pinterest has evolved into a visual search engine that captivates an audience searching for inspiration and stays with them from the top to the bottom of the purchase funnel.
80% of weekly Pinners have discovered a new product or brand on Pinterest. The ability to pin posts with embedded shoppable links allows your brand’s organic and paid content to have a much longer shelf-life on Pinterest than any other social media platform. Whether it’s through rich pins or promoted pins, Pinterest offers vacation rental companies a unique opportunity to showcase their properties to users actively seeking travel inspiration.
The Pinterest Ads Manager enables marketers to target finely tuned audiences that are optimized for specific ads campaigns. Like Meta, Pinterest allows marketers to create ‘actalike’ audiences based on demographic features andretarget site visitors after installing the Pixel code into your website. Pinterest goes even further, encouraging marketers to upload email lists and build personas based on Pinterest user behaviors. The exciting targeting capabilities for this ‘visual search engine’ social media platform set it apart from the rest.
Choosing the Best Social Media Platform for Your Business
Facebook: With its vast user base and versatile ad formats, Facebook remains a staple in vacation rental marketing. From targeted ads to engaging organic posts, Facebook offers vacation rental companies a myriad of opportunities to connect with potential guests. Facebook offers the most comprehensive approach to vacation rental marketing. With its expansive user base and diverse ad formats, Facebook enables vacation rental companies to reach a broader audience. Additionally, Facebook’s conversion tracking in Ads Manager ensures maximum KPI analysis.
Instagram: As mentioned earlier, Instagram excels in visual storytelling, making it ideal for showcasing vacation rentals and providing engaging content related to your area. Its inclusion in the Meta Ads Manager platform allows for easy ad campaign creation and management. Leveraging Instagram’s targeting options, such as location-based targeting and interest targeting, and its various ad placements ensures that your content reaches the right audience at the right time.
Pinterest: Pinterest’s role as a discovery platform and search engine makes it an invaluable asset for vacation rental companies. By creating inspiring content that resonates with travel enthusiasts, vacation rental companies can leverage Pinterest to generate brand awareness and drive traffic to their booking platforms. Its unique ‘boards’ ensure that your evergreen content has long-lasting impact, and its highly refined targeting capabilities create the most finely-crafted audiences available to vacation rental management companies on social media platforms.
When it comes to social media marketing for vacation rental companies, Meta, the social media conglomerate that runs both Facebook and Instagram, remains the first choice for many vacation rental management companies. It’s easy to manage both platforms at once, and its massive user network guarantees extensive reach and, when used properly, outbound traffic to your website. Pinterest, however, is the prototypical next-generation social media platform thanks to its shoppable content and extensive targeting features.
Learn as many aspects of Facebook and Instagram as you can before diving into Pinterest. If you need help, I know a fantastic team of social media marketing experts who can help you with paid and organic strategy across each platform.
By strategically leveraging the strengths of each platform, short term vacation rental companies can create a cohesive social media strategy that captivates audiences, drives bookings, and ultimately elevates their brand to new heights.
