How to Create Social Media Like a Pro

BY MIKE & ANNE HOWARD, @HONEYTREK

To build your brand in this social-media driven world, you need to know how to create quality content. According to CNBC and Arrivia’s recent study, nearly one in three travelers turn to social media for holiday inspiration. And when it comes to the younger generations, 40% of millennials and 60% of Gen Z use social media for travel research. This means that if you want to get noticed by potential glampers and stay on the radar of past guests, you need to create compelling content (photography, video, and text) across the various social media platforms. If you don’t have a background in these areas, that might sound overwhelming, but we’re here to help!

As full-time content creators for 11 years, who have grown @HoneyTrek’s audience to 375,000 social media followers, we’ve learned a few things about creating quality posts and how you can do the same.

Your Instagram wall should show a balanced mix of photography, videos, galleries and images with graphics

HoneyTrek

Know Your Platforms

Today’s major platforms are Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and Instagram (the biggest social media player in the glamping world.) While you can re-post your content across these platforms, each one has a different style and it’s best to tailor accordingly. Generally, your Instagram wall is meant for dreamy pictures and videos so people can quickly assess your offering. Instagram Stories can be more casual, giving a look into a day in the life of your brand, and since those posts disappear in 24 hours, it’s a great place to experiment. Facebook, albeit still highly visual, is conducive to a wider range of content types (promoting events, sharing personal stories, posting articles, creating expansive photo galleries, and including links that are clickable!).

Twitter’s short and text-driven format is good for quickly posting news items, be it yours or other outlets. TikTok, while known for silly dance moves, is a great place for one-take videos, funny moments, mini guides, and their clever photo templates (all of which resonate with millennials). Pinterest is all about creating beautiful graphics and driving traffic to your website.

Ideally, you’d post at least once a week on a few of these platforms, but at the bare minimum you should make a good-looking profile with your business overview and a handful of quality posts on each, so people can discover your brand, send inquiries, or shout you out.

HoneyTrek

Writing Better Text

Even though each platform has its own style, the goal across the board is to add value to your readers. Be helpful, inspiring, creative, funny, and unique. Many times brands are too sterile and salesy. Promotional posts are fine (offering deals and availability updates actually make for great content), but try to do them in a fun way and not more than every third or fourth post. Mix up your subject manner to stay fresh and relevant to more people.

To generate ideas, make a granular list of your camp and region’s most interesting attributes, keep up with relevant news in your community, dig through your photo archive for potential talking points, and don’t be afraid to share other people’s content that might be of interest to glampers. Make yourself an editorial calendar that sketches out the year, months, and weeks to make sure you’re covering a range of topics and capitalize on seasonal happenings. This will help you be more strategic in your messaging and avoid big gaps in your timeline.

HoneyTrek

Improving Your Photography

While you should certainly pay for a professional photographer for your website and marketing materials, your team needs to be taking plenty of good photos to feed the social media beast. You don’t need to know how to use a DSLR camera to take a good picture these days; a top-of-the-line phone can do the trick. The latest Samsung Galaxy, Google Pixel, and iPhone are all good options, with wide-angle lenses, sharp focus, high megapixel images, 4K video, a variety of modes (macro, portrait, food, etc), and tons of tools to improve your work.

One of our best tips as National Geographic photographers is the most basic… clean your lens with every shot! Too often an errant fingerprint is making images look hazy and can be easily fixed with swipe of a T-shirt. Then there is lighting—the heart of all great images. Try to shoot in the soft glow of morning and evening, and in the abundant sunshine of blue-sky days. When shooting interiors, make sure the room is evenly lit to avoid heavy shadows. When setting up your shots, think about your audience of vacationers. You want to set the stage for fun, romance, and adventure. Help tell that story with a few props and a bit of styling. (i.e. If you are shooting the dining area, set the table with food and drinks!) To add more life to your photos, invite your cutest friends (across ages and backgrounds) over for a free stay in return for a bit of casual modeling.

Models having fun on a HoneyTrek glamping photoshoot. In lifestyle photography, the less staged, the better

HoneyTrek

Whether people are in the shot or not, your photography should feel like guests are at camp enjoying themselves or you are expecting their arrival. create quick tours of your rooms, grounds, and daily happenings, giving people a three-dimensional view into your world. Don’t shy away from talking to the camera and showing your personality and life behind the scenes. Start creating 15-60 second video clips for Instagram Stories and enhance them with their easy-to-use tools (see below).

Adding Fonts, Graphics and Music

After you’ve created imagery and text, your social media post needs a little flair. Users are scrolling through crazy volumes of content and you need a way to catch their eye and get them to quickly understand the message you want to send. Cut to the chase with a heading in a pleasing font. Add some pizzazz with gifs that move ever so slightly. (Browse the “gifs” section of Instagram Stories— they’ve got every graphic imaginable.) Pick music to match your content’s vibe; it will entice people to stay longer on your post. Utilize Instagram and Facebook’s interactive features like Polls, Questions, Quizzes, Countdowns, etc. to mix up your posts and encourage engagement.

A simple photo with nicely designed text sends a clearer message on social media

HoneyTrek

Helpful Social Media Tools

While many of the platforms have basic editing tools and enhancement features, below are our favorite apps that will help you elevate your content and stand out from the crowd.

Canva: This online graphic design tool has a huge array of easy-to-use templates made for each social media platform, plus posters, invitations, presentations, and artwork for any occasion. It’s free but worth the nominal fee to unlock all the features.

Shooting Videos

Video is becoming more and more important as a way to communicate on social media. We’d highly recommend paying a professional to make a video about your camp and request a tightly edited 1-2 minute version for your homepage and a long version for you to edit into smaller clips for your various platforms. That said, you also need to hone your skills. Videos can be casual, quick moments captured on your phone, but they can’t be sloppy. Be conscious of wind and background noise messing with your audio and reduce it by recording through headphones or adding a wind screen (even your sleeve will do in a pinch). Be slow and steady as you move (and if you really want your walk-throughs to look pro, get a gimbal to take the bounce out of your step. We swear by the DJI Osmo Mobile). When the light is right,

PicCollage: We use this photo and video collage maker to quickly showcase multiple pieces of footage at a glance and in an artful way.

InShot: We’ve tried lots of video editing apps and this one is the most user-friendly, for anything from enhancing a single clip to combining dozens into a short film, right from your phone.

Adobe Lightroom: Nearly every photo can be improved by adjusting the warmth, contrast, shadow, haziness, and saturation. While some of these mods can can be done in your phone’s built-in editor, Adobe Lightroom is the gold standard in photo editing and free on mobile.

Modifying a Canva template for the cover image of HoneyTrek’s 4000th Day Celebration

HoneyTrek

You Can Do It!

Creating regular social media posts can feel like a ton of work, but once you get in the rhythm of storytelling, sharing, and engaging with your audience, it can be a lot of fun and a great lead generator for your business. Don’t worry if every post doesn’t get gobs of engagement. The more you publish, the more you improve your content creation and chance to be seen by potential customers and the people that love your brand!

About Mike & Anne Howard

Traveling for the last 11 years across 73 countries, Mike & Anne are travel experts with a glamping speciality. They launched HoneyTrek.com to chronicle their journey, and have since written National Geographic’s bestselling book Ultimate Journeys for Two and the first guide on glamping in North America, Comfortably Wild. Earning a Lowell Thomas Journalism Award for their book and a seat on the American Glamping Association Board of Advisors, they are committed to the success of the glamping industry. Businesses from budding glampgrounds to established tent manufacturers have partnered with the Howards for their skills as photographers, writers, influencers and consultants to improve their guest experience and share it with the world.

VISIT: HoneyTrek.com/GlampingExperts

Mike & Anne Howard

HoneyTrek