Hospitality & Tourism

How Abu Dhabi is Boosting Tourism with Social Media

Bringing social teams and agencies together wherever they are

With an internal social media team overseeing several agencies across multiple locations, DCT has more than 25 people managing its social media efforts. One of the Department’s biggest initial challenges was managing activity across such a large and distributed team to ensure the correct posts went out at the right time to the right audiences.

Marketing a destination as opposed to a product or service also comes with very specific challenges as target audiences are much wider and vary greatly. As a result, careful and targeted planning is needed to ensure content is consistent and relevant for audiences.

The team had been using email and other communication channels to coordinate its social efforts, resulting in inconsistent messaging and inefficient governance processes. With Hootsuite, both DCT staff and its agencies now have a highly visible and easy-to-use platform to plan and manage all social media activity.

 By mapping its workflows and ensuring governance through one dashboard, both DCT and its agencies are now able to understand their exact responsibilities, alongside the status of projects and tasks across all social channels. With a more strategic and consistent approach, the team is producing content more regularly and at a higher standard of quality—and boosting reach and engagement across DCT’s social channels as a result.Using Hootsuite’s mobile apps, DCT staff can approve content on the go while attending events and conferences, proving that a thorough approval process doesn’t have to slow down the pace of posting and engaging on social. In addition, giving it access to a solution that can moderate across all social channels.

To reach more people on social, DCT needed to make sure it was discussing the most relevant topics and joining the right conversations. Using the Brandwatch social listening integration within Hootsuite Enterprise, DCT can find and follow conversations about Abu Dhabi on social media to understand the types of content audiences on each channel want to see.

By displaying Brandwatch mention results in a stream within the Hootsuite dashboard, DCT can engage directly with the content in real time. Stream content can also be filtered by a number of Brandwatch filters to customise the results most relevant to a specific campaign or initiative. For example, the DCT agency responsible for Louvre Abu Dhabi can now use a stream to filter results relevant to the museum.

Analysing social data helps DCT create a more nuanced understanding of its audiences on social media. Using Hootsuite Analytics and Brandwatch Vizia—an integrated marketing reporting and command center solution—allows the team to track “non-owned” conversations about Abu Dhabi’s travel and tourist attractions, as well as conversations about competing destinations. By doing this, DCT were able to identify negative conversations about Abu Dhabi and use the insight to inform its social strategy for that particular market.This data is displayed in customisable dashboards that the team monitors in real time. Using these dashboards, the team analyses the success of social campaigns and makes adjustments to optimise performance. Results are reported to other teams and to senior government stakeholders as proof points to the success that social media is having.

With Hootsuite, DCT has transformed the way it manages social content, reducing time spent planning, scheduling and approving content by 60%. Also, Hootsuite has allowed for a collective environment when moderating the channels.

The team has also succeeded in its overall goal of increasing engagement and raising awareness, with 151% growth in followers across all its social accounts and a 71% increase in post volume. What’s more, is that since using Hootsuite, DCT has seen a 54% increase in website sessions via social referral and a 14% increase in conversion rate. Due to this social success, the organisation is planning to grow the internal team to keep up with demand.

With agile social marketing informed by sophisticated social listening, DCT listens and engages in real time with people talking about Abu Dhabi. The Department creates content that matters to its audiences, and is building loyal communities across its channels. With the ability to prove the value of social to senior government stakeholders, DCT is in a position to negotiate increased investment to continue driving awareness of Abu Dhabi as a culturally unique and desirable global destination.