Holidays are usually that moment expected for several months, planed in advance and visualize every morning when the alarm clock goes off. But when it comes it seems like is too good to be true and you try to capture every single moment, to keep that feeling alive until the next vacation.
Nowadays we are living in a digital world based on mobility, which means that the chances for our holiday memories to end up just on our personal computer desktop background are really low. Usually we were used to share our experience with our families and friends, but now due to the expenditure of the social media networks we are sharing our photos and videos with a large audience and sometimes they become User Generated Content (UGC), which is actually a good thing as long as we know what we are doing.
While visual social media is becoming more and more influential in tourism, marketers working within travel orientated business spotted the opportunity and start to use User Generated Content to diminish the promoting costs while gaining consumer trust.
Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are focusing more on facilitating the uploading and sharing photo and video content and also trying to create links between users content through hashtags. This increased attention for visual content is due to the massive success of photo sharing platforms like Instagram and Flickr, but also because of the benefits of UGC.
A good example of using visual social media for tourism marketing is the project implemented by Stockholm international airport which aims to create local travel guides by using Instagram. Users can see the live updates from locals living in one of ten cities (Amsterdam, Bangkok, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Dubai, London, New York, Paris, Prague and Rome), mark the places they want to check out and save a guide composed of the selected locations.
So User Generated Content is a great source of inspiration and creativity, leading to innovative marketing strategies. Personal holiday pictures might become the best advertising campaign for that amazing location that you visited or for that hotel with a breathtaking view. The only thing that matter from a tourist point of view is if you want that to happen or not and if you don’t, you have to be careful when using social media for sharing your holiday experience and use you privacy settings.
Source: http://www.sustainabletourismonline.com/52/sales-and-distribution/users-are-doing-it-for-themselves-how-consumer-generated-content-is-changing-the-face-of-tourism-marketing
Jules's digital trip 