Social media round-up
This week, Condé Nast Traveler rounded up its favourite travel hashtags on Instagram. The photo sharing social media platform is ripe for boastful holiday snaps, in fact, as the article says, the very first Instagram photo was taken by its founder while travelling in Mexico in 2010. Now, our feeds are filled with sunny selfies and luxurious landscapes from around the world with some great accompanying hashtags. Take a look at #kicksonaplane and #airportcarpet for some original pre-holiday excitement and #travelcat will give you reams of kitties enjoying global destinations.
Fancy hitting the nail on the head when it comes to getting your brand message across to the consumer? Well it turns out that brand videos are the way to do it, with over 8 billion brand video views in 2013 alone – that’s an increase of 7,000% since 2006. What’s more, brand videos are shared 12 times more than Facebook text posts. With 36% of online consumers sharing a video they spotted online surely the numbers speak for themselves.
Taking things sky-high, Gogo, an American company that installs Wi-Fi on commercial airlines, announced that it can now allow passengers to make calls and receive texts up in the air. The company demonstrated this by allowing a Walls Street Journal reporter to make one phone from a flight at 10,000 feet. Thankfully the in-flight power nap is still a possibility as the calling feature has only been adapted for private jets, due to its unpopularity with commercial lines.
Finally, following our story last week on the top tourism boards that use Twitter like a real-time concierge, global travel industry intelligence website Skift has the results of a survey of the top airlines that answer flyer’s tweets within the hour. These were American Airlines, JetBlue, US Airways, Air Canada, and Southwest, IndiGo, Philippine Airlines, and PT Garuda Indonesia.
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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