The most important, and the most neglected, part of social media strategy in the tourist industry occurs offline. Customers are highly engaged with hotels, restaurants and other tourist businesses when they are using their services. Most businesses in the Canary Islands fail to take advantage.

In the tourist industry we see our customers for short periods with long gaps in between. Before the internet era quality service and excellent amenities were the only way to build customer loyalty. Now, with blogs, social media and email lists everything has changed. We have the tools to stay in touch with our customers and build loyalty.

The primary aim of all tourist businesses should be to get permission to stay in touch with their customers. We must start engaging while our customers are tanned and happy!

There is a huge amount of information available about the best time to Tweet, post on Facebook and publish blog posts. Most of it is from America where there is only an hour’s time difference separating the entire audience. For Canarian tourist businesses, timing is far less important than the quality of content we provide. This is because our audience is spread across several time zones.

At 0.900 the British are arriving at their desks, just as the Germans start to think of their first mid-morning coffee. The Finns are already planning lunch and in Rekjavik, they have only just woken up. Given these differences, working out the optimal time to send out your stuff is futile.

Every tourist business in the Canary Islands needs a blog that is regularly updated with attractive photos and useful local information.

Google has changed the way it rates websites in the last year: Sites with regular updates of new content do better than static sites. An embedded blog is the easiest way to refresh your website. 

Here are five great content ideas for tourist website in the Canary Islands:

The best five restaurants within walking distance of your hotel

Most hotel guests spend most of their time close to their hotel or apartments. When they go out to eat most of them walk to a nearby restaurant but don’t know which are the best ones.

Cisco Systems predicts that video will account for 90 percentof internet traffic within three years. Even now, 51 percent of web traffic is video and 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Video is becoming too big to ignore.

It is hardly surprising that we are watching more and more online video. If blogs are the magazines of the web, then videos are its television. We spend hours a day watching TV so why wouldn’t we do the same online. The Millenial Generation, those born after about 1980, consume online videos more than anyone else. They are the future of the tourist industry!

Facebook page statistics that go up and down like crazy are a sign that your posting strategy needs to be optimized.  Your content is attracting attention but not enough to boost your Edgerank. Fortunately there is a simple solution.

Facebook’s Timeline has moved the goalposts of engagement in the last six months. Strategies that worked in the past are no longer effective.  “Reach”, “viral reach” and “talking about this” graphs that look like roller coasters are a strong signal that your posting strategy needs a revamp. 

Facebook admits that about 5-6% of its 901 million users might be fake. Many of these fake accounts are created expressly for the dishonest purpose of inflating like numbers.

This makes paying for likes a risky business: Your new fans may well be worthless, fake Facebook profiles created in “factories” in Asia. If you are paying for fans, make sure that engagement rises in proportion to the number of new likes. Otherwise you are likely wasting money on robots. It is faar better to use an agency like Canary Content that focuses on creating quality content aimed at your target markeet. 

Facebook admits that only 17% of the average page’s fans see its updates.  To maximize your page’s impact and return on investment you need to reach a much higher percentage of your fans. To do this you need to understand how Facebook decides who sees what.

Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to grade every single post you make. EdgeRank is the social media giant’s version of Google’s PageRank. Luckily, EdgeRank is a much simpler and more elegant system than Google’s opaque and ever-changing algorithms.

EdgeRank uses three factors to calculate the rank of your posts: Affinity, EdgeWeight  and Recency.

Using a third party app such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to automate posting reduces Facebook engagement by 86%, according to app developer Applum.  

 It appears that Facebook penalises people who use third party apps by dropping their EdgeRank (the FB equivalent of Google’s Page Rank). Most apps also don’t allow you to take advantage of all the tools that Facebook offers on its pages. For example, Hootsuite users cannot create a gallery of images to share on Facebook but must upload only a single image per post.

Penalizing app users makes sense for Facebook. The social media giant has to keeps its pages human and avoid automation. It knows that users will quickly go elsewhere if they are constantly bombarded by robot-created spam messages. Pre-loaded posts are not exactly social.

Canary Island businesses with a Facebook page this means focusing on creating a community of engaged users over time rather than just focusing on post frequency and volume.

There is currently a lot of talk about the need for the Canary Islands to cultivate the loyalty of their visitors. The debate however, has to a large extent missed the point. It has focused only on what we can do while our tourists are in the Canaries. The hugely important subject of how to stay in touch and build loyalty once they have gone home has been ignored. 

With Canarian tourism now in its sixth decade, customer service and amiability should be second nature. Rather than pinning all our future hopes on smiling a lot and providing good customer service, we need to move the debate towards what happens once our visitors have left the islands. In short, we need to stay in touch with our visitors and make sure that they come back.

Photos are everything when it comes to marketing tourist destinations and businesses via Facebook.com. Treat your Facebook timeline like a glossy magazine: Make sure it is visually attractive and full of useful and easily digested information.

The initial impact of your Facebook page comes from the photos that you share with your audience. They are what catch the eye and make people go WOW. If your page grabs their attention they are more likely to like the page and follow your new posts.