Expedia - Social Media Strategy

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Social Media Strategy

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Introduction

The purpose of this report is to illustrate the use of a social media strategy in Marketing Communication through the analysis of #OnlyInSouthAmerica, an Instagram campaign launched by Expedia in 2015.

In this campaign Expedia posted selected high quality  photos of its customers featuring beautiful destinations in South America on an Instagram account named #OnlyInSouthAmerica, and people were invited to comment on such posts, being awarded the chance to win a South American vacation sponsored by Expedia.

The success of the campaign was tremendous and was reflected not only in the growth of Expedia’s Instagram followers in more than 63,000 people, but also in the increase of the company awareness reflected in the high engagement score (999) on Unmetric's platform.

 Company

Launched in 1996 as a subsidiary of Microsoft, Expedia is now the world’s leading online travel company, with a portfolio that includes approximately a dozen of the world’s most notable travel brands.  Hotels, flights, car rentals, cruises, and even entire vacation packages - Expedia has it all.

Campaign

With the goal of driving interest in South American tourism, and, ultimately, increasing bookings and brand awareness, Expedia, in partnership with LAN and TAM airlines, launched a social media marketing campaign, inviting people all over the world to post comments on more than 30,000 photos available in https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/onlyinsouthamerica/.

The prize was a trip to Rio de Janeiro raffled among the participants.

Strategy

This campaign was in line with prior campaigns launched by Expedia, where the company had taken advantage of the tremendous possibilities provided by social media to promote products, brands and companies.  #ExpediaChat on Twitter or campaigns such as “Expedia’s South America Week”, did not only allow Expedia to reach a leading position as a top of mind brand, but also contributed to the development of tourism in the promoted regions, therefore fortifying the partnerships and alliances with local companies and country tourism boards.

In #OnlyinSouthAmerica, Expedia seized the opportunity of having followers to spread the campaign between their connections, using contents provided by them (the photos of beautiful and exotic places and their comments on such photos). And this made perfect sense. With those “resources”, Expedia’s work was limited to the idealization of the contest, establishment of partnerships and the promotion of the campaign via the already established channels (taking advantage of their pre-existing followers), which involved minimal costs to the company.