Global recognition for Cape Town Tourism’s social media presence
Almasalla Travel News – Cape Town Tourism has been announced as a winner in this year’s annual Travel + Leisure SMITTY Awards [ (@sweden) to regular citizens for one week at a time, in a bid to feature the local voices and flavors of Sweden.
Digital marketing and social media have been an integral part of Cape Town Tourism’s marketing programs. Cape Town Tourism’s eMarketing strategy focuses on using citizens and fans of Cape Town from around the world as the marketers of Cape Town. Some of the tourism organization’s digital and social media milestones include:
– The creation of a virtual fan park for Cape Town on Facebook. The I ♥ Cape Town [ https://www.facebook.com/CapeTown.Travel ] Facebook fan page stands at more than 280,000 fans and was recently recognized as one of the top brand Facebook pages in the country.
– Regular tweets and blogs have earned Cape Town Tourism a place as one of the top 25 most influential tourist boards and DMOs online (rated by http://influencersintravel.com ).
– The launch of the new Cape Town Toolkit [ www.capetown.travel/toolkit ] that includes diverse itineraries, high-quality images, and information about Cape Town that allows registered users in the travel, tourism, and marketing trade to access promotional material and resources at the touch of a button.
– An integrated marketing campaign with National Geographic saw Cape Town and Durban feature across National Geographic platforms for a period of fourteen months between April 2012 and June 2013. The campaign had a strong online focus and included a one-hour documentary about the 2 cities, a series of TV vignettes focused on the unique sounds of each city, an array of international National Geographic magazine features, editorial on National Geographic’s website, as well as a social media and digital campaign championed by National Geographic’s digital nomad, Andrew Evans.
– Cape Town Tourism was one of the pioneering DMOs to work with travel bloggers in a formal way. In August 2012, Cape Town Tourism hosted 4 top international travel bloggers as Cape Town iAmbassadors. The campaign was called #LoveCapeTown, and over the hosting period, it recounted their experiences of the destination across various digital and social media platforms. Cape Town locals were called on for crowd-sourcing ideas, and, as the marketers of Cape Town; their engagement resulted in over 36 million Twitter impressions in 3 weeks (via Tweetreach).
– In 2012, Cape Town Tourism used Facebook as a tool for uncovering Cape Town and it’s abundance of attractions via an interactive travel game app called My Cape Town Holiday [ www.travelandleisure.com/smittys .
