Posts Tagged ‘Focus’

4 Ways to Maximize your Milestones!

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

Have you just returned from a fam trip and been awarded another specialist certification?

Has your hotel just earned another award?

Will your attraction be featured on a new Top 10 list?

As a tour operator, have you just booked your 10,000th client?

Here’s your chance to make your business milestones work hard for you!  Facebook offers a fabulous tool to showcase your company achievements and boost your credibility…for FREE!  Beats taking out an ad!

Milestones are similar to highlighted (starred) posts    and will enable you to show off a bit, without being a show-off.  When you add a Milestone you’ll be defining a recent event or story so that your fans will better understand your business.  Remember people do business with those they know and like.  This gives your clients and potential clients a chance to know you and like you better.

Here’s how it works:

First.  Log-in as your business page.

Second.   Hover over the share box and click on Events and Milestones

Now you’re ready to create your Milestone

Third.  Complete the info in all the drop down boxes.  See below.

Fourth. Upload photos either from your Facebook Photo albums (Choose from Photos) or from your hard drive (Upload Photos).   Tip: Add photos that tell the story of your Milestone.  Multiple photos are great as they will appear as a film strip beneath your main photo.

Fifth. Complete the story box.  Remember it expands so that you can include as much info as you feel is relevant to your audience.

Sixth.  Remember to click SAVE!  Your Milestone will become a part of your Timeline and stay in chronological order

Here’s how it looks. 

Bonus TipYou can Pin    or  Highlight  your Milestone so that it shows up more prominently.

Hint:  You may want to crop your photos in advance of uploading them if you want to Highlight your Milestone.  This will eliminate heads being cut off!  Also, remember to upload as many photos as you have because you’ll have space for 7 photos when you Highlight.

Travel & Tourism pros, here’s how to use this.

Travel Consultants:

Fam trip: Showcase your new expertise with photos

New Destination Specialist Award: Add a photo of your certificate along with destination photos

Hotel:

Renovation: Show off your newly renovated rooms, restaurant or lobby.

New Menu: Take photos of your new menu as well as the chef preparing the food

New event décor: Include photos of new tablescapes, new trade show set-up, wedding décor

Anniversaries: Create a milestone for the anniversary of your opening

Attraction:

New events or shows: Upload photos of guests enjoying the new features of your attraction

Restaurants: Show off your newest restaurant or food outlets.  Include room and food photos.

Tour Operator:

New travellers: Take a photo of your 10,000th client along with them enjoying the trip they’ve booked with you.

New Staff: Upload photos of your team, tour directors, reservations team, etc.

New Destination: Include photos of destinations you’re just beginning to offer along with your ground handling team, hotels, attractions.  Make this a virtual tour of your newest destination.

Anniversaries: Have you been in business for 10 years?  Create a Milestone!

Association:

New Staff: Include photos of your staff in their offices, res staff at their desks.  This will put a personalized face out there for your members.

Events and meetings: Upload your candid shots and event highlights.  Then Highlight the Milestone for even more exposure.

Member awards: Include photos of awards you give to your members.  Include a photo of the award and of the person.

Monthly new members: How about including photos of the members that have joined over the past month.  Tag them in the photos and bring even more exposure.

What other ideas do you have for using this powerful new tool to engage your fans?

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Join me socially:  Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn and Pinterest

When you ‘like’ my Facebook page you’ll have access to Free Resources just for travel pros!

8 HOT Highlight Tips for Tourism Pros

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

Highlight on your Timeline

Have you ever noticed a large, expansive billboard that can’t help but grab your attention?  Highlights are that billboard on Facebook Timeline.

Wouldn’t you love to have your latest photos spread across the entire width of your Facebook page?  Highlights lets you showcase posts, photos and articles. When you ‘Highlight’ a post by clicking on the star it enlarges the post so it spreads across the entire 2-column width of your page.   Talk about attention-grabbing!

How about Highlighting a series of photos that showcase an upcoming tour or your niche market.

Here’s how it looks:

Showcase your niche market or new menu items

Get more ‘likes’ when you highlight a video

Consider highlighting a preferred supplier or a new product.  This is a great way to shine the light on a group departure.

Highlight a supplier or market an upcoming group.

Showcase an event – from NTA’s Facebook page

Here are some examples you’ll want to put to work for you today:

  • •Hotels:  Are you renovating, updating your pool, or rolling out a new lobby look?  Post the photos to a new photo album then write a post about it and highlight it.  Notice the photos look like a film strip?
  • •Tour Operators:  Do you have some great new photos related to your next group tour?
  • •Attractions:  How about giving people a visual tour focusing on a new experience each week.
  • •Restaurants:  Here’s a great way to feature new menu items, updated facilities or new décor.
  • •DMO’s:  Explore ways to highlight different facets of your destination while showing people enjoying unique experiences.
  • •Travel Agents: Showcase a recent fam trip to maximize your credibility.  Shine the light on an upcoming group departure or niche market tour you’re arranging.
  • •Association:  How about using Highlights to showcase a recent conference, meeting or educational tour.  What an amazing way to build membership by showing potential new members the reasons to join.

What will you Highlight on your Facebook page?

Highlights generate inspired, attractive Timeline Facebook pages. Be creative as possible and have fun choosing what you want to Highlight on your Timeline.

For more information on Timeline, click hereAnd here! More here!

Connect with me online

Join me socially:  Facebook, Twitter , LinkedIn and Pinterest

When you ‘like’ my Facebook page you’ll have access to Free Resources just for travel pros!

11 Best Twitter Practices, 2 tips to avoid!

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

Building and nurturing Twitter account is only part of the social media equation! Next is mastering how to best put this social media tool to use for you.

Best Practices

  1. 20 tweets/day and 1 in 4 tweets can be about your business on average; other tweets should be conversational
  2. Ensure your tweets are relevant to your audience
  3. Retweet items of interest to your followers
  4. Continue adding more followers (connect with me for tips on how to add and engage the right followers: www.twitter.com/catherineheeg)
  5. Market to the next level of followers – market to your followers’ followers
  6. Answer questions from other Twitter feeds
  7. Use # to direct people to information on a specific topic or destination
  8. Ask followers to take action; drive them to your website, blog or business location
  9. Follow up and stay involved in the conversations
  10. Listen more to what is being said by others on Twitter
  11. Add your Twitter feed to your other social media sites

Mistakes to Avoid

The biggest and ‘baddest’ is not responding to direct questions or concerns with your best customer service voice.  This is imperative.

The other common mistake people make is putting forth too corporate of a voice.  Twitter is all about making connections on a personal level and having fun.

Go out there and have some fun!

Keep the conversation relevant.  Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Three F’s of Selling!

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Ok, I know what you’re thinking!  Nope, that F-word doesn’t figure into to this line-up.

In order to successfully sell and market yourself, your product or your destination you may want to consider these 3 tips to keep from failing:

  1. Don’t flub up!
  2. Don’t fritter away your time
  3. Don’t forget to have a bit of FUN!

We don’t wake up in the morning and say to ourselves, “Today I’m going to consciously flub up.”  Nope, if you’re like me you wake up and go thru the list of things you need to accomplish during the day.  Flubbing up just happens!

In this day and age of Facebook, Blackberries and Twitter the need to be totally wired seems to take over.  At times do you feel that there’s just too much going on that it’s hard to focus on any one thing?  (There’s another F-word for us)  Is this lack of focus is perhaps the cause of flubbing up?

At a recent convention I noticed that people were trying to Tweet during an educational session, they were downloading photos of the speaker to their Facebook page and they were surreptiously trying to answer e-mail on their Blackberry.  How do you think their focus was on any of those tasks?  How much less listening to the speaker and trying to absorb new ideas was happening?

On the flip side of the coin is the second point.  Don’t fritter away your time.  While we’ve become experts at multi-tasking to make better use of our time, do you at times find yourself staring at your email and reading one e-mail after another while an important task awaits.  This type of time-suck is a method of procrastination!  We look busy; we convince ourselves that this is important work.  However, consider what’s really at the top of your To-Do list.

Lastly, in order to stay successful and not fail, we need to have some FUN!

Just think if you were able to play hooky at lunch?  How about a full day of Fun!  I’ve been known to take ‘executive retreat’ days and increase my Fun quotient coming back to the office refreshed and ready to take on a new project.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and success stories on the F’s in your work world.

Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Get in Touch with Catherine

Catherine welcomes you to phone or e-mail her with your needs and interests. A preliminary discussion will help determine whether Customized Management Solutions may help you drive the results you’re looking for.

Contact Catherine Heeg