How to promote your vacation rentals on social media

1. Work on a social media strategy:

With 3.8billion people currently active on social media, you have endless opportunities to tap your potential customers and bring direct sales. However, don’t jump right away without having a proper social media strategy in place. To begin with, understand your social media goals. Do you want to get a direct booking, promote brand awareness, bring more footfalls to your website? 

Once you know what you want to achieve, work towards it. 

2. Use location tags

How does your target audience find you who doesn’t even know that you exist? Using tags and hashtags come in handy here. For example, if you have vacation rentals in Port Aransas, use the hashtag Port Aransas and vacation rentals. This will help people to land your posts who search for Port Aransas. If you’re using Twitter, check out the relevant trending hashtags and use them in your post. Instead of using random hashtags, look for well researched, and targeted hashtags. 

Encourage guests to review:

If your vacation rentals are listed on Airbnb sites, reviews can make a significant difference. But if you’re taking bookings outside home-sharing platforms, guest reviews on your social media sites can help you create a positive brand image for yourself and thus increase your search engine rankings. 

4. Identify the social media platforms:

From Instagram to Twitter to Facebook, several social media platforms are available. Know your guest demographics to decide on which platforms you want to divert your focus to. For example, if your target customers are millennials and Gen Z, Instagram is where you should channelize your marketing efforts to. For Baby Boomers, Facebook is ideal. 

5. Know your budget and frequency:

While you can use social media platforms for free, however, to give it a promotional boost, you need to spend money. Understand your marketing budget before you invest in it. It is a good idea to try out the platforms for free before you spend on it. 

1. Create visual content:

Give your audience a look and feel of your property. Share pictures and videos of your property or host a live watch party

and take the travelers on a virtual tour of the property. 

2. Encourage your guests to share pictures of your property:

It always gets you an extra boost when your guests share photos and videos of your properties on this social media page. Encourage them to tag you when they do so. This way, more people will get to know about your property.

3. Focus on the experience

Does your vacation rental offer exclusive access to the beach? Can your guests relax on private Jacuzzis? Share these experiences that your travelers would love to know. 

4. Keep it meaningful:

The secret formula for winning over social media is sharing useful information that potential travelers would like to know. Too much of salesy advertisements can quickly chase away potential customers. Instead, post about the beaches near your vacation rental and what activities they can do in the nearby area. Is there a local celebration? Talk about it. Does the place have any exciting history? Tweet about it. Share tips and information that would pique the traveling spree. 

5. Offer deals:

A great way to promote your vacation rentals on social media is to offer attractive deals! Give your followers irresistible discounts for a limited period on direct booking from your social media page. Take holidays into account while offering such deals. Valentine’s day or long weekends are the best time to offer discounts. You can also offer promotions during the low season to help your travelers grab some attractive deals.

6. Build relationships:

Social media are not just meant to offer promotions and deals, but a place to interact and build relationships with your audience base. Be creative in your interactions. For example, you can post a picture from your vacation rental and ask them to share a tagline for it. Make it even more enjoyable! Offer discount coupons to the ones who share the most creative tagline. You can also run polls and holiday-based contests to engage with your audience.