Do you ever struggle with Instagram??? 🤳

I have been talking with many of my consulting clients about whether Instagram is worth the trouble and how to incorporate it in their strategy?

I feel like we have outdone ourselves as the next 3 weeks, are all about Instagram and Direct Bookings on The Accommodation Show. As you well know, Instagram is a staple of many businesses’ marketing campaigns, and for good reason. It has a large and diverse audience of over one billion monthly active users and 500 million daily Instagram Stories users who are happy to engage with brands, resulting in high engagement overall. Because of its incredible visualization power, Instagram is a great platform to showcase your property and business in front of many potential guests to help you connect with your current and future guests throughout the year and build long-term relationships with them. Keeping in touch with travellers enhances their satisfaction and creates an engaged community, but ultimately all our roads lead to direct bookings (ibooked.online), which, in turn, reduces your dependency on OTAs.

However, simply having an account and posting regularly is not enough to ensure success. To reap its full benefits, it’s important to maximize all of Instagram’s features. That’s why over the next three weeks, we’ll be doing an Instasuccess series to equip you with all the knowledge that you need to gain a comprehensive understanding of Instagram’s potential as a marketing tool and how to leverage its full power to increase your direct bookings and revenue.

In this first episode of the Instasuccess series, we hear from a true Instagram marketing expert who has a personal relationship with Instagram’s algorithm, Paul Anderson. Paul is a seasoned professional in consumer psychology and content marketing. With extensive experience in the accommodation industry, he has mastered the art of crafting compelling content that resonates with audiences, drives engagement, and speaks directly to the desires and motivations of his avatar. He and I cover a range of topics, including the key to success in the industry, how to take advantage of Instagram algorithms to attract the right audience, the advantages of using Instagram, how to get guests to interact with your property pre-booking, how to build a brand on the platform, utilizing the content pillars effectively, how to include yourself in your brand, and alternative content options if you prefer not to be on camera.

In this episode we cover:

❓ What makes Instagram a powerful marketing tool for the accommodation business?🔑 What is the key to success with social media marketing?

🎯 How can you use Instagram algorithms to attract the right audience?

👍 What are the advantages of using Instagram for your business?

🤝 How can you use Instagram to get guests to interact with your property pre-booking?

🏢 How can you build a brand on Instagram that resonates with your customers?

📷 What are the six content pillars in social media marketing, and how can you utilize them effectively?

💁‍♀️ Is it necessary to include yourself in your brand on Instagram?

💰 How can Instagram marketing help you get direct bookings?

🤝 What kind of long-term relationships can you build with guests through Instagram?

Paul Anderson (also known as The Social Media Hotelier) is a bestselling author and owner of a successful guesthouse in the UK, Sandfield Guesthouse. With his extensive background in Consumer Psychology and Content Marketing, Paul is the go-to source for valuable insights into the Accommodation Industry about all things social media. Unlike generic marketing advice, Paul’s practical strategies for boosting bookings and revenue through Instagram cut through the noise and deliver real results. He’s a gifted communicator with a knack for breaking down complex concepts into easy-to-understand tips. Paul’s teachings cover everything from technical aspects of content design, creation & publishing to customer preferences, market segmentation, data-driven marketing, and competitive advantage, all leading to fully booked rentals. His expertise is in high demand and he loves sharing his experience with others.

Don’t miss out on the wealth of free resources he offers on his Instagram page to take your marketing game to the next level!

This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to get all those potential guests on Instagram interested and looking at your page, which is all of us. Paul’s insights and tips will provide you with practical strategies that you can start implementing right away. So sit back, grab a notebook, and get ready to take your Instagram game to the next level!

Instagram marketing is a large topic that we can’t finish in one episode, next week, we will tell you exactly how to turn these lookers into bookers.

📽 Watch the episode here
🎙 Listen to the episode here

Transcription:

Hello and welcome back to The Accommodation Show. We help accommodation owners like you get the knowledge and skills that you need to really grow your business, improve your guest experience, and increase your profitability. 

Okay everybody welcome back to the combination. Another beautiful morning in Australia and I am joined by the wonderful Paul Anderson all the way from the UK. Welcome to the show.

Paul: Bart, thank you so much for having me. It’s really good to see

Bart: Thanks. It’s very good to see you as well. And I’ve been looking forward to this episode because it’s one that we haven’t done yet. We haven’t covered off on Instagram, and I know that you are one of the people or one of the best people in the world to talk about this particular topic. Paul, tell me a little bit about yourself, your business and so I guess what you do for your day job, and then also why we’ve got you on the show to talk about Instagram.

Paul: So I’m currently sitting in Southfield guesthouse just on the east side of Oxford City moved into the building way back in 1986 When I was a kid, and then in 2008 2009, came back from having lived in South America bought the building and turned it into a six-bedroom guesthouse. So my first guest arrived in the middle of 2009. I’ve run it as a one-man band pretty much ever since, just I who answers the phone just me who answers the doors makes the bed, and all that good stuff. Everything was ticking along very, very nicely. And then of course COVID struck.

And I sat back and I was thinking very long and hard about what I was doing, why I was doing it, and how I was going about it. And despite always having had the adage as an entrepreneur since I was 24, and 25 Work hard, advertise, advertise some more go back, and advertise again. I realized that I’d stopped advertising. So back in the day, it was lumpy marketing, it was trifold brochures, pounding pavement, all that good stuff. But with the advent of TripAdvisor, and all the review sites and all of that type of thing. What happened was my lumpy marketing just tailed off and I realized I was literally just surviving on word of mouth, which wasn’t going to cut it for the future. 

So I very quickly Googled free, how to advertise for free or cheaply, and of course, the obvious came up Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and on and on it went so I revoke a Facebook page. We started a Twitter account. I still don’t really know what Twitter is, but I hear it’s good. But it was Instagram that really grabbed me the creative dynamism that afforded me alongside a lot of the more technical aspects of how to achieve things, all in the kit and the gubbins and the cameras and all the stuff that I managed to convince my wife that I need in order to market my business always really, really, really intrigued me. So here in the UK, when you finish high school, you do something called levels. Most people do three or four I did maths, physics, economics, and art, and had I not done the art I would never have been as good at the other three. And Instagram provided that for me. And what soon became apparent was my enjoyment and my work is an obsession with Instagram and creating content and delivering value. And personalizing my brand for my ideal guest was coming through in my content.

Bart: Yeah, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about. Right? So we’re gonna be talking about you know, why Instagram and how you actually approach Instagram and that sort of thing. And, like, I didn’t know about that story in that journey that you’ve been through. I knew that you do run the guest house at the moment. Set the scene for us a little bit, what is the guest house look like? And what the kind of current business and the current infrastructure because for those of you that are listening, or for those of you that are watching this video, you need to let you know one is that this is going to be part of a multi-episode series where you’re going to get me and Paul talking about all the things you need for your business in terms of Instagram. So we’ll be focusing just on Instagram if you’ve ever had any questions. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t use Instagram enough or it’s not important to my business. We’re going to talk about all the reasons why Instagram is important and how you could potentially use it. In this business. So make sure that you like it, and you subscribe so that you get those notifications when they pop up. In the future episodes that we’ll do so going back, Paul set the scene for us a little bit.

Paul: So, the building in Sandfield house was built in the late 1930s Somewhere in the middle of magnetic seven somewhere in there. When when the family moved into the building it was just a four-bedroom house with I guess you’d call it a dunny and outside Danny outside toilet. No central heating electrics was sharp. absolutely hated the building I just didn’t want to be there. But over time, as we moved into it and as a family, we can sweat, and blood all went into it turned into a beautiful period building now with six guest bedrooms, and then my wife and I built an extension in the back. So we have our own little bungalow, kind of wedged under it. We’re about a mile and a half from the dead center of the city in a very kind of leafy, semi-urban rural type environment, surrounded by hospitals and they will be the bread of my income. So four of my six guest rooms are single rooms. When I opened everyone thought I was crazy. They were saying what are you doing? 

You’ve only got two double rooms are you insane? And at the time, I genuinely didn’t know what I was doing had an opportunity. I put a sign out outside. I installed the 5internet, got the fire reg sorted and I just started trading. I didn’t know what I was doing really. But it turns out that a lot of people visit a lot of people in hospitals. There are six within 10 minutes we’ll have here. My butter will be the university. So we have two universities here. There’s the famous one and then there’s Brooks. So I have a lot of regulars who are academics, and researchers. It’s not just parents visiting families, but there are always conferences going on that type of thing. And then always draw a contrast with Cambridge. We’re much more of an industrial city. So we have the BMW mini factory. There are a lot of printing presses here going on. There’s Oxford University Press. So a lot of trade is happening here. Also, most people assume that being in Oxford City I make quite a lot of money from tourists. 

This is not the case. Never in my history of trading and I made more than 8% from tourists, basically because I’m on the London Road and Oxford, and for those who know the geography even loosely, Oxford Street in London is literally the same piece of tarmac. The buses go past every 15 minutes. We get a lot of data and there’s on this side of Oxford City. Large grounds, thinking about infrastructure really, they just it’s just a six-bed guesthouse, essentially with all three rooms, and it’s warm and comfortable and we’ve done everything we can to keep all the period features and the coding. We’re quite fortunate in this neighborhood in that the gentleman who built this built about 15 or 20 around the neighborhood but this one was his. So we have a lot more interesting things in some of the other buildings it says corners and massive coding and you can see fireplaces so this was like his pick of the bunch. 

Bart: Actually if anyone’s watching so you can’t see it so much behind you but if you look in the mirror, you can see the top of the ceiling which is quite interesting. So there’s a mirror behind you. So if anyone’s watching they could spy on the other side of your room. Now look, I want to bring something to the attention just there and this is to all the listeners and anyone that’s watching. When I asked Paul to tell us about his business. It was really interesting. He started talking about his target market and all the people that he’s working with and convincing them to come to his place, which is sudden that you were kind of I don’t know if it was subconscious or conscious, but kind of your elevator pitch small. These are all the kinds of people that I talked to that I tried to get to come and stay with me so that was where the scene was set. 

Rather than going, I bought this building or that building is actually talking about his avatar or demographic that he’s targeting and we will talk about demographic and avatars probably a little bit in the future. But I love how you set the scene there and really sort of gave me an idea of who your target audience is. And I think that if you are in a hotel and if you are in a bed and breakfast if you’re a short-term rental or in a motel, you need to be able to talk about your audience and the people that are coming to visit you.

Paul: Yeah, I would say that I mean without my guests, I wouldn’t have a business. I mean, granted if I didn’t have a building a business but equally as a one-man band in a building that I’ve known for 35 years or so. It’s very important to me that I attract the right people because I have guests and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid if they checked out and something permanent nasty happens to them. I like to have a particular type of person I like very much to target all of my content at. Those individuals are not just academics, but academics. And that means that I am happier. They’re happier. And so for me, everything starts with the guests having what they want, understanding your expectation, and managing them. Once they manage that makes it very easy to exceed.

Bart: So let’s crack into it a little bit in terms of Instagram and Facebook and there are a few things I want to clear up before we get going. One is in terms of talking about Instagram and what we’re about to talk about. And we’re just talking to people that that have kind of I call it a boutique, a combination like yourself, are we talking to everybody is like hotels motels, better breakfast short term rentals. Is that kind of if the listener is in any of those categories, will this information apply to them?

Paul: Absolutely. And I think that that list goes on and campsites glam sites, caravan sites hotels, b&b guest houses where they whether you’re small, whether you’re large whether you have a collection of short-term rentals, a portfolio simply because Instagram is such a wide top end of a funnel. That if you get it right and you teach the algorithm who and what you’re about the algorithm, a lot of people will say things Oh, the algorithm hates me on working gets the algorithm but the algorithms are there to match your content with people who will value it. So if you’re constantly targeting your back briefly on the avatar piece if you’re constantly targeting that one individual, or that very small subset of individuals, then the algorithms are there to match your content with the people who will value that. And so in many respects, the algorithm is automatically targeting your marketing for you providing the teachings consistently of what you’re about who you are, why you do what you do, and what you provide to guests. And in so doing, you can take that 2 billion, and the algorithms will slice it for you and push them onto your page. It’s then our job to convert them to get them off Instagram. Get them onto our websites and get a button out button in front of them.

Bart: I love that and I talk about algorithm how the algorithm actually works. You’re absolutely right, but it’s not a mystical thing it’s always trying to do is try to provide the right content to the right people. So they gauge themselves there. They stay on there, on Instagram or Facebook or anything but everything like that provides valuable information as well. Stuff that there’s going to interest them stuff that’s going to be relevant to them. And what’s interesting is you know, even you’ll notice with Instagram, or any of your social media, pre-COVID and post-COVID are completely different. So you kind of have to refigure out your audience because everyone’s got a bit old. Everything’s changed out there. But let’s rewind a bit and when we talk about our choice of social media platform, why Instagram?

Paul: So for me, Instagram presents an enormous and enormous dynamic range of creative possibilities. And this means that hosts,  hotel owners, b&b owners can either pick and choose what they prefer or they can merge them and they can mix all those formats up. So some people are very very happy personalizing their brand and business, getting their faces and voice out in front of the camera, and pitching that. I’m comfortable doing it. I wasn’t originally, but I needed to be because I’m the person who opens the door. I’m the person who answers the phone, the person it’s just me equally. The graphics. The carousels now with the reels templates, where you can just automatically upload a series of images just allowing people to personalize how they present, and showcase their property and amenities. Now it’s not to say that Instagram is any better than Facebook or any better than Tinder. It’s just very, very, very broad. And I think if you were to put Instagram in the middle Tiktok would creep in on one side and Facebook would creep in the other but if you put Facebook tick-tock wouldn’t be anywhere near it. So as an all-encompassing platform with more than 2 billion monthly active users. It’s a very effective funnel essentially, in order to attract your ideal guests like a magnet inbound marketing is content marketing, it’s not outbound, and just draws people in.

Bart: And what appeals to me a lot about Instagram which seems to be not as much as developing the reality of it, so if you post something up because of a format and because of the way that it displays the content, people can get through it, an awful lot of it. And therefore, you’ve got more likelihood of people actually seeing the content and you’re actually producing.

Paul: Absolutely right and I think also if you were then to combine it with, so to rewind a little bit, Instagram went heavy on short-form video content in order to try and combat the onslaught as it sort of ticked off. What then very quickly realized is that people were on Instagram because they want Instagram and they want to tick tock tick tock now that the two sets of algorithms there’s no one algorithm is going to have 10s of 1000s of algorithms constantly in play. That takes a while and is all about entertainment. The Instagram algorithms are all about value. So both of them are designed to keep people on the platform for as long as possible. 

So when we create content, it’s very transactional when we then post it up on Instagram. So if we create valuable content directed at our ideal guest, and they spend time with it, they will the algorithms will then push it out to more people who are very similar to that first set of views. So the really key part about that is that if you then add in the distinction that Instagram was trying to make now from Tik Tok, and some of the other kinds of younger is is really, really pushing hard on SEO and searchability is looking at keywords. The map functionality, it’s in its early fledgling stages, I wouldn’t say it’s clunky, but it’s got a long way to go. Whereby, if you put your location into a post, people can then tap that location and they can see all the other creators in the area. So if you’re the only b&b on an island somewhere and you’re doing that and someone wants to go and visit that island, you’re going to be the person who pops up. You’re going to be the person whether you’re rural or whether you’re urban. If you can get ahead of the curve, use the map function. 

Even in your profile. There’s a tap, and there is a tappable link that will take you either through to an Instagramer map where you can look for local restaurants, bars, and other hotels you can compare with the competition, but also through to someone like Google Maps, figure out how long is it going to take me to drive there, okay, it’s only two hours. Let’s have a little bit deeper. So the combination of the functionality of keywords and SEO, with the location with the creative dynamism, with the possibility of going unnecessarily massively viral for you, creates, I would argue strongly a perfect opportunity to showcase what you do. And to literally just push people onto your website. Once you’ve got them on your website. They’re no longer distracted by all the other stuff because as you said, people get through lots of content very, very quickly if you can grab them, and take them where you want them. You’ve got their undivided attention.

Bart: I love all of that. I absolutely love it. I love that sort of understanding of how we get our guests to interact with our property before they’ve paid even thought of staying with us. If we talk about Instagram, and if I was to talk about like 2023, 2024 hours a year, and we will say which platform do we really want to focus on it and double down on for us as a business it’s 100% Instagram because we know that you can build a really strong following very quickly, but you need to get your messaging absolutely spot on because otherwise can be very confusing people. Talk to me a bit about sort of building a brand on Instagram, and how we make sure that it makes sense for our customers.

Paul: So that most of your audience, I’m sure will be aware of the ideal guest avatar concept. So I’m not going to teach anyone to sell gigs there, but what many, many hosts forget is the next step. And that is to describe four or five or six content pillars as they’re known in the marketing world. And content pillars are just an unfancied way of saying topics you know, your ideal guest is going to enjoy. You describe four or five or six of those depending on the nature of your business. Classics would be local places to eat and drink. Local attractions indoors, local attractions, outdoors, reviews, and unique selling points.

What sets you apart from your competition, except dogs or you have a llama grooming shop out the back or whatever that happens to be. And then simply consistently posting just within that framework. Because what that does is it achieve two things. It means that you know that you are always delivering value to your ideal guests whatever you’re posting. Instead of just Oh Happy New Year. Well yeah, Happy New Year. That’s nice. So what why is that going to make anyone coming back with you because everyone else is saying Happy New New Year, all at midnight around the world? So if you stick with those half dozen topics and those pillars, well that also does because the algorithm is not only looking at viewer behavior, it’s looking at creativity. 

So if your keep consistently sending the same message, the same five or six topics, and you’re doing it once a day, or three times a week, Monday through Friday, or just once a week, whatever it is long as it’s consistent. Then the algorithm will learn what you do. When you do it how you do it and go okay, I know these people are interested in it because they’ve been interested in it. Before. They will then engage and then the algorithms will push it out to more people. So the key part of the messaging is to identify topics that you know, your ideal guests will always be interested in hearing and just talk about those.

I will give you a really good example, I posted there’s a picture of a boat with a little story about a place where it used to be legal to skinny dip off at about 100 That was in January of 2022. I posted the exact same post with the exact same words, in January this year. I mean tripled the reach triple the explosion, because I think potentially training the algorithm to expect that type of content, usually at the beginning of a week, not at the end of the week, and it just pushed into everyone who had enjoyed it the previous time. And then more people so you can repeat topics and you can create a whole list of subtopics within that you can roll through which is still talking about the same thing.

 So eco credentials here are one of my pillars. But within that I can talk about being 100% Carbon Positive I can talk about the Evie charging, and we can talk about the city in the country having zero emissions. We’ll talk about the local public transport route being a hybrid so even though I’m within that pillar, I can still be rolling through the topics. And as a result, my followers and nonfollowers will ultimately learn what I’m talking about what I’m about the algorithm will do exactly the same thing. And then the algorithm is helping me to get in front of the right people, the people who want to come and stay.

Bart: That’s, that’s so golden. That those tips and a good way to think about it for those of you that don’t use Instagram so much if you look at some of the biggest social media influencers or social media profiles, you’ll see they’ve been highlights on their actual profile and those highlights generally those lanes or those topics that they talk about on a consistent basis. And what you want to find between yourself and Instagram is in raising that brand awareness are those topics that are still relevant to you and relevant to your business, but they’re going to be appealing to your guests and things that you become a bit of an expert on or that they’ll seek you out for and I liked. I like the idea of local things to do. 

I like the sustainability angle. So you get you need to try to find those. And you can use all sorts of tools you can Google to try to find some ideas you can use ChatGPT to really understand what those 346 different pillars are but don’t make it too many different content pillars or too many different topics that you’re talking about because then once again you’ll you’ll create a lot of confusion for your guests.

Paul: Absolutely But it highlights equally are when it comes to branding on a graphic level you’ve got your profile photo, your profile picture, I would recommend that it’s a standout logo better yet, particularly if you’re at my end of providing accommodation running a guesthouse would be to personalize that by putting your face in it but the Instagram highlights themselves you can then color coordinate them to match your branding because the viewer journey to your book now button goes through from a post they enjoy the post they want to see more they go to your profile. The profile is just a first impression depending on the age of the viewer you have between three and eight seconds to make that first impression. 

The viewer will then do one of three things they will either get on with their lives because you’re not for them. They’ll follow you for later because they think oh actually I might want them to come back to this are quite fancy a holiday is leaving on the Gold Coast. Or they’ll hit that link in the bio and if you’ve used your brand colors in your feed and in your highlights when they go from the post to your profile and onto your website, that journey becomes seamless. They don’t feel like they’ve gone anywhere. But actually what you’ve done is you’ve taken them from Instagram with all dancing dogs and people falling off and all the Instagram jazz and you’ve got them into your world. And that’s absolutely key to coming back to highlights. Also. I describe highlights as the perfect place to put decision-making information in front of your next potential guest so rather than me. Instagram highlights are built from Instagram Stories. Most people dismiss Instagram stories because once you post them they’re live for 24 hours and they go to story heaven but what you can do is if you sit down and you consider say the top six questions that you are repeatedly asked by your guests, you can create a series and FAQ series with a cover FAQs I asked do I have Wi-Fi do you do car parking? What time can I check in do you serve breakfast? And then you can have another one and another one? answering all those questions in very basic format. You can delete them from your stories without going to an archive. And then you pull that archive into the highlight and you call it FAQs. 

This means that rather than someone going onto your page, fiddling around with posts, maybe going onto your website can’t find what they want because it’s fragmented. You’ve answered all of that there. So you take away the resistance from anyone actually looking a little bit deeper. So by the time they do get to your website, they’ve had all their questions answered, or they’ve seen all the local places that you’ve negotiated deals with, or they know why you’re particularly special. So when they get to your website particularly if you’ve taken those content pillars, those topics and you’ve used that to craft the words on your hero image and everything that follows and the colors match. They’re almost at the book now but before they even need to read it.

Bart: Look, the other tip that I’ll give to people and this is another little hack is you can get a real and then you can repost the real as a story and that story can then be put into a highlight. So a little bit I guess you know, conceptually similar we will also come back to in future episodes, but I have one final a couple of final questions for you to wrap up this one because next week we will be talking about converting Instagram lookers into bookers. So how do we use Instagram to get more direct bookings and how do we create the right messaging? the right consistency which I know that you’ve already been hinting at in this episode, but one of the things when we think about Instagram and you know we’re gonna get we’ve got excited we’ve listed this episode. Okay, great. I’m gonna get on to Instagram. So you’re gonna set up your profile. And we’ll talk about that as well next week is how to set up a profile and what you need to think about. One of the things I wanted to ask you, if I’m going to do Instagram and I don’t want to be in front of the camera, do I need to be all-encompassing? What’s the value of placing yourself as part of the brand?

Paul: I think in many respects it can depend upon the nature of your business and how personal etc. So I’m very much at one end of the spectrum when I open the door to guests who have seen me either doing silly stuff or sensible stuff on Instagram, they’re not surprising me. They know my name. They know what I sound like. They know my personality. They know that I take my work very very seriously but I don’t take myself very, very seriously all that good stuff. 

Because our guesthouse is a very personal brand, particularly because I’ve lived here for so long. At the other end of the spectrum, if you’re an individual with 15,10, or five properties in lots of different locations, and you’re managing them all and you’re not a person who’s on the ground. Then personalizing your business with your voice and your face becomes less important. That said, if, for example, you are the type of person who you are customer service even though you’re remote and people are going to be talking to you and coming to you with issues, even if it’s only for a few hours. Of a day that you take ownership of and set up a customer service team. 

Then using your voice will start to make you recognizable people will start to believe what you say and they will begin to trust you. And then when they do come to me now booking they see your face on the website, founder or CEO of such and such, then they will already have made that connection. And it’s more than just breaking the fourth wall as such. It’s it actually creates an emotional connection. Believe it or not all of the chemicals get triggered and oh, I know who this person is. You have a level of expectation and anticipation as to who they are and what they’re going to do equally. I think having a kind of a morals and ethics policy behind any business is a very good idea. What do you stand for you all about ICO? Are you all about helping the local community or whatever you are? been communicating that in whatever you do, whether that’s vocally or whether it’s in your texts or whether it’s visually if you can do that with a person is always much more powerful than just black and white text.

Bart: I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment behind posting yourself up and the connection that you can bring to your audience. There are so many there are also so many ways that you can get away with not being the front or the face of your business and it’s still working really well to create that emotional connection. And you can do it through amazing photography. You can do it through amazing valuable content, which really appeals to guests and we will talk about it more in our future episodes. 

Folks, if you’ve been watching the episode, thank you so much if you’re listening, thank you so much as well make sure that you like and subscribe but before we go Paul what’s the best way for people to find you and all this rich goodness?

Paul: The best way, naturally is on Instagram, so you can find me  @thesocialmediahotelier. In my link and bio, there are lots of free materials on guest avatars, reel creation, on strategy. If you’re interested in one on one coaching all that stuff is there as well. I’ve been doing this for about 18 months or so and all I’ve been doing pretty much for all that time is just giving out free content and free help and free advice, essentially for hosts, from hosts, so go ramage around, You can direct message me, but @instagramhotelier on Instagram is the best way to go.

Bart: I’ll put those links the link to that in the show notes and then I do also have your business profile as well. If people wanted to have a look, we can give that link as well. 

Paul: My business profile 

Bart: So you’re using both for the same accommodation?

Paul: No. Okay, so I have @sandfield guest house for the guest house. This was a side hustle and is now a second career. So when people ask me what’s your full-time job? I go oh, is it the Royal Air Force? Is it…? Is it the guest house? It’s all three. So my wife says I have a portfolio career, so the guest house is @sandfield guest house.

Bart: I’ll put that on the show notes as well so people can have a look at everything that you preach in practice as well. Folks, like I said this is a multi-part series so make sure that you like and subscribe and you will get notifications of future episodes. The next one 100% is going to be about turning Instagram lookers into bookers. How do we convert people into direct bookings? Well, thank you so much, have a fantastic evening, and I’m super looking forward to doing our next episodes together.

Paul: Lovely. thank you so much. It’s an absolute delight.

Thank you so much for listening to the show. You can find us at theaccommodationshow.com where you can find all the show notes and links to the resources we talked about. I really do appreciate you listening. And if you’d like to support the show, please subscribe. Leave a comment, and share it with others.