Coming up with an original idea for a social media campaign in today’s crowded, noisy and fragmented environment isn’t easy. But this year Ireland’s national tourism is doing just that, writes EyeforTravel.com contributor, Andrew Hennigan

Some campaigns focus on a single social media platform, but since consumers have their own preferences some marketers prefer broader coverage. This is one of the ideas behind an ongoing campaign called The Gathering Ireland 2013, an major marketing initiative promoted by Fáilte Ireland, Ireland’s national tourism development authority and Tourism Ireland, the destination marketer for Ireland.

The overarching theme of the campaign is that throughout 2013 families, communities, organisations and anyone else can organise so-called ‘gatherings’, events where the 70 million people around the world who claim Irish ancestry can return to the country to participate. 

What is original about this campaign is that it mobilises grass roots initiatives, encouraging people in Ireland to reach out to their distant relatives, friends and descendents and invite them home. It also provides tools to make this easier – you can create your own gathering through a dedicated website – and a comprehensive social media campaign to promote and document the initiative. A campaign of this type would have been impractical before the widespread use of digital communication.

A six-pronged approach

“We are covering TheGathering through six social media channels,” says Amanda Kavanagh, Social Media Manager for The Gathering project.  “Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Linkedin, Pinterest and Instagram”.  All of these channels follow the same themes but the content is differentiated to take advantage of the strengths of each. “In Facebook we grew the fan base from just 2164 when the campaign started in July 2012 to more than 67000 today,” she says. “This increase is driven mainly by the use of apps that exploit the rich functionality of Facebook pages.”

There are regular competition apps where people can win trips to Ireland and an Invite & Attend app which pulls gatherings from the website onto Facebook where you can see if any of your friends are attending a gathering”.  A creative twist in the Facebook page is that it uses a distinctive framing for images that makes the posts instantly recognisable and which stand out in news feeds. This technique is surprisingly effective for boosting visibility.

Adapt to stand out

On the other channels the campaign posts related content adapted as appropriate. On the image-sharing site Pinterest ‘The Gathering’ posts images of selected gatherings plus parallel material such as Irish recipes. Content from the blog is also linked to the Pinterest page. On Instagram it posts daily photos, a mixture of professional photography and user generated images, with hashtags to build communities. On Twitter there are news and updates and also selected promoted tweets to reach a broader audience. Meanwhile on YouTube the campaign posts a mixture of original videos created to specifically promote The Gathering plus the ‘I love’ video blog content. There is even a group on LinkedIn providing space for industry conversation and debate on themes related to the campaign.

“I think that the key learning in this campaign is that we have to adapt the content to each channel”, says Kavanagh. It’s not just a simple case of copying and pasting, even if it is the same message. “We use a lot of the same content across channels but we are tailoring and framing it differently each time. We don’t automatically post Facebook to Twitter and vice versa and we don’t tweet Instagrams without changing the description.”

Look out for more detailed insights from Andrew Hennigan on how to get creative with social campaigns on EyeforTravel.com next week