Tourism marketers can significantly benefit from embracing the creation of short-form vertical videos like reels, stories and TikToks.
TikTok travel specialist Josh Porter, who boasts over 3.2 million likes on the platform, has offered a range of tips for harnessing this new, powerful and cost-effective medium.
Porter’s video-making journey started when he was on the private Cempedak Island in Indonesia.
When the COVID pandemic hit, Porter had the option of either returning to England, or staying on the island. He chose the latter.
He then focused solely on content creation, as “the landscape, activities and animals on the island cried out to be taken as video”.
Porter started by taking videos of black soldier flies, highlighting how they contribute to digesting and recycling the island’s food waste.
Other videos ranged from creating wooden chessboards, to installing can crushers, further highlighting the sustainability focus of the island.
“If you have the ability to capture it [what you want to film] in a concise form, which people can digest, then you will have something people can resonate with – if you capture it well.”
Porter then went on to say that lodges around the world could learn from the sustainability initiatives at Cempedak, with sustainability being such an important topic.
TikTok tips
This leads Porter to his first TikTok tip, relaying that “the most popular stories are often ‘back of house’ rather than just nice pics by the pool”.
He highlights the fact that videos showing the actual operations of lodges, hotels, or any other tourism-related enterprise – whether that be in making food, implementing sustainability initiatives or supporting wildlife – are often the most-liked posts on social media.
This goes against the general tendency to post footage of beautiful views or luxury experiences.
The second tip Porter shared is that people mostly watch videos on social media with the sound off, and if you want to catch their interest, it’s handy to start with footage that prompts them to turn their sound on.
Through trialling various ways of structuring videos, Porter found that he got fewer likes when starting his videos with beautiful, scenic shots.
“I found that people scroll past my videos because they are probably sitting there thinking, ‘this is pretty’ and go on to the next video after five seconds. There are so many beautiful landscape videos online that it is difficult to get viewers to watch the whole video.”
He then experimented with starting his videos with “a talking head”, simply some footage of him talking directly into the camera. This simple restructure switch significantly increased the views and likes of Porter’s videos.
“This way, people see the video starting with someone talking and it gets them to turn on the sound. Once they hear what the video is all about, their attention is instantly locked to the screen and they tend to watch until the end,” Porter explained.
He also suggested that it was better for viewers to see the person talking rather than just doing voice-overs.
Porter advised tourism-related businesses to practise different ways of filming content to figure out what their audiences ‘like’ the most.
