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- [00:00]
Liam
Foreign to the Boostly podcast. This is the podcast that gives you the tools, the tactics, the training and most of all the confidence to go out there and get yourselves direct bookings. Today, we're welcoming back Paul Anderson. He is the social hotelier, sorry, social media hotelier, a returning guest from three years ago. We were talking just before we pressed record. I can't believe it has been three years since we've had Paul all on. However, in that time he's gone on to do some amazing things. He is a speaker on Instagram. He was even in the Direct Booking Summit, which is something run by Mark Simpson, which was on recently and worth checking out on YouTube if you have not heard of that. We'll be diving into what's new For Instagram in 2025, the biggest mistakes that hosts make and other contact content strategies that turn lookers into bookers. So let's jump in. Welcome along, Paul. Thank you for joining me today.
- [00:57]
Paul Anderson
Thank you so much for having me back, Liam. I can't believe it has been three, three years and I can't believe that you still don't know that I am the social media hotelier after three years we've known each other.
- [01:07]
Liam
I know it is. I don't know how I get that mixed up. I could have practiced it 100 times. This is where we hit record. We stick with it.
- [01:17]
Paul Anderson
And I have to conclude, confess that over the last couple of years I have considered a rebrand because the social media hotelier is a bit of a mouthful and everything is the social media hotelier.com and all the rest of it. It just goes on and on and on. Particularly because I specialize in Instagram organic marketing. So since I was last on the on the show, which as you said, was what, April 2022, I have closed my guest house in Oxford, England. So that was after 15 years of enjoying being a host. I kind of came to the end of the line personally with that and now. Oh, thank you, thank you. It's been an interesting shift, but maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later. I close it in order to focus my efforts on helping hosts leverage the full power of Instagram to drive traffic to the booking websites and listings. And that's what I do full time now, which is, which is awesome because I absolutely love teaching. I love helping people. I love seeing people get awesome. I love seeing people get awesome results and just the ability, I think, or the opportunity to talk shop. If anyone's seen any of my content previously, I do talk about this if I go to the pub with my mates and I start talking about short term rentals and, or Instagram. By the time I've been to the gents and come back, the place is just absolutely cleared. So thank you. Thank you for the opportunity.
- [02:37]
Liam
Hey, it's good to have a community and a place to come and talk about this stuff. I thrive off having these kind of conversations and I'm sure the people listening to this are gonna really get some value out of this episode, as I know you always deliver gems of value. I'm, I'm really excited to dive into the Instagram stuff, but I just really want to take a moment just to say how amazing it is that you've, you've done those 15 years of hospitality and that's allowed you then to move on to coaching, training and helping others in the hospitality space. So big congratulations for that.
- [03:09]
Paul Anderson
Thank you.
- [03:09]
Liam
Liam, what would you say is the one thing you want people to remember from this episode?
- [03:14]
Paul Anderson
Oh, crikey. I know you and I do tend to go on tangents and move forwards and back, but I think if there's one message that I could give to hosts who are looking to use content marketing is that there is nothing to fear when posting content. And so I would encourage people to just hit post. Done is always better than perfect. And so if you're, if you produce some content and it hits the mark and it goes viral for you, brilliant. That's super. Aim to repeat that performance. But if it's rubbish, so what the algorithms will go, this is rubbish. They're not going to show it to anyone. And so no one will actually know really. So the trick then is to learn from it for good or for ill. So we can understand why it did, why content did or didn't perform and then iterate towards the success, then we stand a chance of improving, getting better, driving more traffic to our, to our websites, to our listings. And so I'd like one message to be just hit post nice.
- [04:21]
Liam
And I know there'll be a few people curling their toes just going, oh, but I'm a bit worried about it. But we can dive into some actionable stuff on this podcast. But before we do, one of the things I know about Instagram, I get those messages from people on Instagram, hey, I'll help you grow your followers and stuff like that. I'm fully aware that they want to market as themselves and they probably don't understand hospitality and I think that's a really important thing that people need to understand about yourself, is that you truly understand hospitality. So just before we dive into the actionable steps, can you just talk us through the history, how you moved from hospitality into this coaching space and what that brings along with it as some of the experience and how you understand what the people listening to this are trying to achieve.
- [05:05]
Paul Anderson
It's a fairly long story, so I'll try and keep it short, if that's okay. The reasons for the move are in no small part your fault, Liam, and certainly Boost Lee has to shoulder a large proportion of this blame. So somewhere in the maelstrom that was the pandemic, I, along with many other business owners within and outside of hospitality, were forced to or had the opportunity to take a step back and to consider what we were doing, how we were doing it and why. And it dawned on me that despite having been self employed for decades and living by the adage of work hard and advertised, advertise some more, go back and advertise again. I pretty much stopped actively marketing my business. You see, when, when I opened the doors to my guest house in Oxford, it was 2008, 2009 and it was, it was way back in the day when I used to receive inquiries via fax and so as well as the kind of outbound comms and people sending me a fax and I pick up the phone and call them and all that type of thing. Marketing at the time was also very, very lumpy. It was trifold brochures, business cards, pounding pavement essentially to get my business into the Oxford colleges, local hospitals, cafes and all that. But slowly but surely, the kind of advent of TripAdvisor and the online travel agencies grew into the beer moss that we low and that we know and perhaps love or hate today. And with knowing it, my business was, was running from a marketing perspective simply by virtue of being number one on the number two rated guest house in Oxford on TripAdvisor. And that was it. So I'd stop designing brochures, I'd stop my weekly round robins jogging to local campuses and hospitals and putting my card up in local supermarkets and such, and I'd actively stop marketing myself. So I opened up Google and I searched for something like modern low cost marketing. And up popped what I now know to be the usual suspects. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or X. Still don't really know what Twitter is, but it's good and in short, just content marketing. So I joined a Facebook bootcamp, would you believe, hosted by Boostly, and I saw amazing results. So I registered an account with Instagram and Twitter, but I still really had no idea what I was doing. I was posting pretty pictures, but I was getting crickets. And then I discovered captions. So the words that accompany the pretty pictures. So I started to try to use those to encourage people to book with me. And still it was just. Just tumbleweed. So despite very slow beginnings in terms of results, Instagram seized my attention. After all, that's what Instagram is designed to do, is to grab people's attention and to hold it. And I lost myself in the mashup of. Of its creative breadth and dynam. With its creative breadth and dynam. With its creative breadth and dynam. I can't say dynam, dynamism, dynamism, dynamism with the technical data and the kit side of things. So the, the best way to explain where this obsession comes, comes from is to tell you that when I finished high school and before I headed to law school, I left with qualifications in four subjects. Maths, physics, economics, and art and design. And the thing is, if it wasn't for the art and design, I wouldn't have been half as successful with the others as I was. And the same applied to my efforts on the Instagram. So I was determined to figure out how to use Instagram to push people onto the booking page for my guest house. I'd seen heaps of content saying it could be done. So many Instagram gurus talking about posting every day, mixing content with videos, 20 stories a week. And so I tried it. I'm part of a local independent business group, and they ran a kind of 30 posts in 30 days challenge. And I just dove into that and I saw an improvement in results. And I decided at the end of that challenge just to keep going. Another 30 days of devoting all my time essentially to creating content went by and I was officially obsessed. The problem with that was I was obsessed to the point of stressing when I didn't have anything lined up to post the next day. So much so that one night I got out of bed in the dead of night, threw something together, hit post, and then finally managed to get back to sleep. The sad thing is, the next morning I woke up, I went to check on what I'd posted and I realized, can I. Can I use slightly off color language here or do we keep Use whatever.
- [09:58]
Liam
Language, whatever color you like on booster?
- [10:00]
Paul Anderson
I realized it was just utter shit. It was total shit. It gave nothing of value to anyone. And it certainly didn't serve my purposes other than to relax me because I posted something in the dead of night when no one else would have been looking. And if they were looking, they definitely would not have been interested. So I'd fallen into this trap of following generic Instagram advice, and I found myself posting for the sake of posting. So I just stopped. I went totally cold turkey. I was just thinking, screw this, I'm posting every day. Performance is flatlined. Instagram was telling, telling me that no one was visiting my website. I thought I could get much better return for my time by doing other things. And weeks and weeks and weeks went by, but I still felt drawn to Instagram. I was still consuming content. And then, and then I saw the post that changed it all. And I really, really wish that, that I could find that post again or remember who posted it, because I dearly love to say thank you. I forget the exact words on the screen, but the message was simple and that was to not confuse consistently with constantly. And now they may have meant something altogether different, but I took their message to mean that it would be okay if I posted just a couple of times a week, so long as I was consistent about it. So I pulled up the 30 day challenge. I looked at the content I'd posted using it and kind of used it as guardrails and tweaked the six or so posts that had performed best. And then I scheduled them to publish on the following Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, for the next two weeks. And it felt awesome. It was, it was just like a revelation. And so I moved through the 30 day challenge notes that I'd made and I decided that I would post again three times a week, decide what I was going to post about until I exhausted those 30 suggestions. And unbeknownst to me at the time, what I'd done was I created my first content calendar.
- [12:04]
Liam
Nice.
- [12:04]
Paul Anderson
About 10 weeks of it, which was just like, wow, looking back on it, I didn't realize, but now I'm just like, actually you were, you were starting to make some structured progress. And after I began to move through it, I saw patterns emerge and what was working and what wasn't working. And then reels became like a, like a thing. And I dove into creating videos. And the whole time, and this is the really important part, I was deliberately avoiding anything from the, from the gurus telling me what to post, how to post and when to post. I was simply looking at my lane and doing what was working for me. And in so doing what I'd done is I then, without realizing it again, it moved from a content calendar to a content strategy. What am I Going to post about, when am I going to post about it, how am I going to structure it? And the rest is really history. So in about six months, I'd gone from chucking a towel in screw this from a new standing start and posting nothing to consistently hitting three posts a week and driving about 30, 35% of my booking pages traffic from Instagram.
- [13:16]
Liam
That is amazing to hear the change from a host into a coach. And what I'm taking from this is, first of all, like you say, consistently doesn't mean constantly. You don't need to be posting every day. And it's certainly something that resonates with me as a host because I've done exactly that. I was posting every single day, I think, for a year, but just absolute. Whatever, whatever I could find. It would be a picture of like the, hey, this is where you park at this place, you know, it would be whatever content I could keep up with because of the, the amount, but ultimately that consistently, you can post consistently good content but less of it and achieve much better results is what I'm understanding. And from that time back in covert, obviously we knew each other back then, but I can remember seeing your Instagram stuff back then, and that was definitely the reason that I remember that's what stuck out. I remember going, oh, Paul, he's awesome with his Instagram content. You were, you were doing stuff that others just weren't. And that's, that's, that's how we've ended up, you know, on conversations like this. And, and it's, it's just an awesome journey to, to see and actually to, to witness firsthand.
- [14:29]
Paul Anderson
So thank you. Because what, what, what happened after that was Jenny Bon asked me to present her first ever direct booking success summit. And then Mark Simpson, we all know Mark from, from Boostly, asked me to run a few boot camps for him on Instagram on what I was doing because it was unconsciously, but very much contra flow to what the other generic advice was. And then I realized that as a, as a result, half of my Guest house followers were other businesses just like mine. Hosts who were never gonna book with me because they're too busy running their own businesses and trying to crawl their way out of COVID and such. So I asked them, why you? Why are you here? And those that responded predominantly said, well, so we can beg, borrow and steal your ideas from you. Now, we both know people who would be outraged and upset by such a thing happening to them, but I'm very much a believer that imitation is the greatest form of Flattery. But I also knew, and this is important when it comes to follow account and such, I also knew that they would be diluting my engagement. They were also very, very, very unlikely to ever move onto my website and book a stay. So set up another account specifically to show them. And that was the birth of the social media hotelier. And so I spent literally a year or so just posting about what I was doing with my guest house account, why I was doing it and not asking for anything in return. And it genuinely hadn't occurred to me to ask for anything. And word got out. Thank you Bruce Lee. I'm still not comfortable with it but someone started calling me the king of reels. And then, and then people started sending me direct messages asking for advice specific to their marketing. And as we were talking about before we kind of started recording, I then had to guard my time. I couldn't just go and help everybody because I was, I had my own business. And so I started to dabble in creating content and strategies for other people for, for a small fee and then soon realized that if host didn't invest in learning the marketing foundations that underpinned it all, they soon drifted away from the strategy that, that they paid for and, and went back to kind of cookie cutter posting just to post. So, so I gave that up completely and then leaned into one on one coaching and that's really when things took off and the results that hosts were getting started to just, just accelerate really. And my one on one clients kept saying to me this is absolute gold, you've got to make it more accessible. And I ummed and ah for about another year. And then last June at one of boosie summits I announced that I'd be turning the one on one coaching into a self led training program with monthly live group calls in a Facebook community. And I'll be absolutely honest, it was very scary because the first 15 or so hosts who took me up on my early verd offer did so on faith and recorded anything. There was no training, absolutely nothing. Today we're about 55 strong, the modules are about 60% published, the Facebook community is thriving and the results that hosts are achieving are genuinely beyond even what I could could achieve back in the day. And they're just yeah, I'm just feeling very, very proud. I'm not going to well up but I do feel quite protective of them and they are doing really, really, really well.
- [17:58]
Liam
It's super cool to see that journey and I know we're just still at the you know, start of that that amazing journey and seeing these, these hosts, like you say, as the group is growing, if people are listening to this thing and hey, I want to improve my, my Instagram, then you're 100% in the right place and we're going to be sharing how you can come and get involved in what Paul's mentioned there. So I guess one of the questions that I've got and host listening to this is what is working now that perhaps wasn't working before? You know, what are some of the big picture kind of algorithm changes or the things that we need to be aware to generate that engagement?
- [18:36]
Paul Anderson
Wow, three years of Instagram change. Okay, a lot has changed. Instagram is a constantly shifting platform and importantly how and why people consume short form content. So tick to TikTok YouTube shorts. Instagram is, is always in a state of flux and despite arguing for years and years turn blue in the face that these platforms are not social media platforms, they're advertising agencies. The word social remains uber important. Most recently, the statistics strongly suggest that the direct connections between accounts, so direct messages and sharing content are being pushed much harder by Instagram. People are spending more time in the direct messages than they are on the home feeds. And this is why we're seeing the rise of services like ManyChat. And it's absolutely then the case that posting frequently and regularly is not a marketing strategy anymore. So on the, on the connections front, the last few years have seen a wealth of features added to direct messages, particularly video messaging broadcast channels being able now to forward schedule direct messages. And so it feels like there's, there's a new movement, there's a new type of story sticker apparently released almost every month. And following the the success Of Meta integrating two of its platforms, Facebook and WhatsApp, they're now making efforts to do the same with Instagram and WhatsApp, to pull all three platforms as such into one ecosystem. So we can now add WhatsApp details to the contact us button for business accounts. There's now a WhatsApp sticker which allows people one click access to send a host a message from an Instagram story. They get. You can basically have the, have the guest come straight into the host's direct message portal. If they use WhatsApp for business and wrap that all up then in the, in the advent of AI and this has completely changed the landscape for smaller creators. So in the right hands, AI can now generate mountains of content. In fact, I think recent estimates are now that over 50%, I think it's 54% of content on the Internet is now AI generated, but I always caution my students against relying on it too heavily. Yes, we can use it to generate ideas and to plan content, but increasingly I see people copying and pasting what it produces and just thinking, well, job done. And saddens me because people who are looking for shortcuts rather than to make the workflows more efficient, which is what I use AI for, they. They forget the immutable fundamentals that underpin all successful marketing and the content just becomes part of the noise and the jazz that's being spewed out there. I would strongly suggest that to have any chance of creating any form of impact, we have to create signal that cuts through all of the noise and the jazz by understanding who are we talking to? Because Instagram is a one to one platform, not a one to many platform. If we think about how people consume content, it's one person on the other end of one of these. A lot of people will feel like they're standing on a stage and broadcasting. We need to understand who we're talking to, what do they want to know to move from state A wanting or needing a trip to state B wanting to book with us, and then how to structure our marketing to grab attention, hold the attention, and then redirect that attention. And then the bottom line is how to structure and create the publication, essentially, or create and publish marketing in a way that is repeatable and then can be iterated and improved upon. So by understanding this, we can precisely target our perfect potential guests and we can cut through that noise because Instagram, and this is the overarching theme really, Instagram particularly is becoming such a noisy place that we need to cut through that noise with signal. We can also educate the algorithms as to who this content should be put in front of as well. So the algorithms work on our behalf and then we can attract guests who are perfect for us and that we are perfect for. I do have students in my Instabook program who disagree with me and they are obsessed with follow account and they're obsessed with reach. But I would hold firm. It's less, as we said earlier on, it's less about quantity of content and quantity of followers and engagement, and far more about the quality. So for example, when I was running the guest house, I would far, far rather have had 52 followers who all wanted to book a one week stay with me than 52,000 who might find me entertaining.
- [23:42]
Liam
Brilliant. And that's such a good point, because so many people are concerned by that metric of how many followers? And that number of followers is great if you're trying to become, I mean, one of my friends partners, she posts cleaning content and she's got so many followers and, and she just posts cleaning content and she gets sponsored by, you know, the various brands for, to do various content and stuff. And it's great. But ultimately what we're looking for isn't. It is, is those engaged people who are going to come and stay with us. And like you say, having those 52 engaged people who are likely to book is so much more value to us as hosts than like say 52,000. That's a really strong point.
- [24:22]
Paul Anderson
I think also that yes, having a large volume of followers does lend a brand some sense of credibility. But what I struggled with back in, back in the day when I started was the first thing I wanted to do was get to 100 followers. And there's a very solid reason for that. When you get to 100 followers with a business account, Instagram will give you far much more data and insights and metrics that you can then use to guide what you do next. But then I wanted 250 and then I wanted 500 and then a thousand and then 2500 and then I wanted 5000. It's a, it's a constantly moving goal that we will never actually satisfy. And so instead of pursuing like all the gurus are saying, massive growth, how to grow, how to get more followers and all that, I would encourage hosts to focus more on how many people are visiting our profile, either from a search or from a piece of content. And of those who visit the profile, how many are then hitting that link in bio, the only place where we can have a permanently clickable external link that will take people where we want them to go and give them the only opportunity that they have to give us some of their hard earned cash.
- [25:40]
Liam
Makes sense. It makes sense. And just that point about the AI side of things, because let's say there's so much AI content, I mean, as you scroll through these days. But I, I gave a, you know, what they call a metaphor for, or an idea of what I think using AI is like, say in the days where we just used like sweeping up, you know, stuff in your home as opposed to using a vacuum cleaner. Well, imagine that you could have a high end vacuum cleaner that you operate on yourself or you could have this automatic vacuum, you know, one of these robot cleaners. Well, we all know, right, that only if you've got somebody on the end of a vacuum, it's probably going to be better than the automatic vacuum. But it's one of those ones where you can have a. You can have more control over it, and that's that. To liken that to AI, instead of just taking the AI content and posting it, like having an automatic robot vacuum, it kind of does the job. But ultimately, if you have somebody actually operating that and using it as a human, interacting with the AI tools at our disposal and then publishing it, you've got the best mix, haven't you?
- [26:50]
Paul Anderson
So it's very good for. For bulk work. So I like your analogy with the. With the vacuum. I have a friend in Norway, in Oslo, and he has an enormous garden, and he has a little robotic thing. It's got its own little dog house, and it just bleeps out and it. And it does his entire lawn for him, and it does it beautifully. But his big frustration was that it can't go around the edges with a set of secateurs doing all the edges. And so I've said to him, yeah, but it's saving you hours because you're not having to go up and down and up and down and up and down. You're just doing the edging, which you would have done anyway. And I think the mistake. Not the mistake, but I think that the trap that people can fall into is assume that AI will do everything.
- [27:34]
Liam
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly.
- [27:35]
Paul Anderson
And it's the finishing touches that will make the difference in the quality of the finished result. If he didn't do the edges of his lawn, it would look. It would look shocking. It would look all kind of fringy and weird. But he's saving himself a mammoth amount of time by having a little machine that goes around, cuts it up, tips it in a box, does all of that for. For him. So, yeah, absolutely love that. That's a wicked metaphor.
- [27:57]
Liam
I like that. I like that a lot. I might have to steal that one from you. And I love the fact that if somebody just tuned into this part of the conversation, they'd be going, why are they talking about lawnmowers?
- [28:06]
Paul Anderson
Why is he doing this?
- [28:07]
Liam
Yeah.
- [28:08]
Paul Anderson
What are they talking about?
- [28:09]
Liam
But ultimately, I completely get your point about the changes over the last few years, and there's certainly stuff in there that I hadn't thought about. But what if you're a host who you're either just getting started or you're a host who did create an Instagram account three years ago, but you've just not given it enough time or attention? Is it too late for these people to be getting involved? What's the best way for them to get going at the moment? Or should they really just be focusing on whatever the new kid on the block is, like Snapchat or TikTok or something?
- [28:37]
Paul Anderson
Oh, crikey. I think it's important to frame my answer in that, in the way that people consume media and therefore marketing is vastly different from how it was five years ago, 10 years ago, 25 years ago. No longer is it the case that, that people tune into television and be confronted with a world of ads, basically. So we spend money on Netflix to go ad free. And for the people and the listeners who are in the uk, I don't know if you're aware, but you can watch Channel 4. You go watch Channel 4 news without ads, but you have to pay for it. So people are on that level averse to being directly sold. People aren't reading newspapers like they used to. It's all on an app. People aren't watching TV like they used to. All of that old school marketing and the thought process is not the fundamentals, but the thought processes that go into the delivery of that marketing have completely shifted and they've shifted and the attention is now on social media. And so I would say in my time using Instagram, I would suggest that sweet spot would have been about three years ago when the world and Instagram's algorithms went crazy for reals. That said, I'd say the next best time to start is today, with the caveat that organic, certainly unpaid content marketing is a long game. And so I think I could break the suggestions into, into two for hosts who, who want to get started or want to reinvigorate what they've done previously. And the first thing would be don't do anything until you have a granular description of your perfect potential guest. Because without this crucial foundation, you will literally just be posting and hoping. I have a freebie. If anyone wants a free worksheet that hosts can work through for this, just send me a message, a direct message on Instagram at the social media hotelier or drop me an email info atthesocial mediahotel.com and I will send it over. Because any marketing department worth its soul in any industry, when presented with a marketing project, the first question they will ask is who are we targeting with this content? And the more granular you can become, the more knifelike you can be to cut through that noise and create the signal that then connects with that perfect potential person, that perfect potential guest on the other side. The next step then is actually Very, very simple. Make a simple spreadsheet with the following column headers. Service and space, nourishment, local activities, reviews and testimonials, and reasons to book direct. And then under each column just write down everything your perfect potential guest wants or needs to know about these topics. And then simply just roll through these topics. They're known in the, in the traders content pillars and you just talk about service and space, then talk about nourishment, then talk about local activities and just roll through them. And you could just make a little calendar so that you know what your tutor post about and when. That's how I would start. I'd understand who I'm targeting and what they need to know before I went anywhere near a platform. The second suggestion is not really a plug because I just like to help people and that's just reach out to me, ask questions and let me help. It all began from a desire to help. I'm very averse to gatekeeping. I'm always saying telling people do this and do that. People like, why aren't you charging for this? Just, just get people moving, get them on, on, get them on their way. So if they really want help to take it to the next level, they could book a free call with, with me. If they don't, then they can just go to the social media hotelier. But the hard fact is the most important place to start with any marketing, whether it's choosing the the words to put on your hero image, content that's going to go out on Instagram, what blogs are you going to write for your website and where are you going to find the backlinks that go to. It is to understand who you want to host, who you're perfect for hosting and understand them on a granular level. How many kids they have, how old are the kids, what type of car do they drive, where do they do their regular shopping, how old are they? What are the motives? Because it comes back to that Seth Godin thing of marketing being moving someone from state A to state B, wanting to have a trip or take a trip to our location, to wanting to stay with us. And if you can uniquely identify the psychographics that will move someone from state A to state B, then you give yourself a really super foundation for marketing across the digital landscape.
- [33:29]
Liam
I like that, I like that. So if you can't get started three years ago, get started today and really define who your target guest avatar is. So that brings me on to the next and this is the big question. This is getting to the meat of it. What content should hosts be posting in 2025 to actually drive direct bookings? Because that's what we all want. What would you say is the best kind of formats, post types, things like this, the real, the real detail.
- [34:02]
Paul Anderson
I knew you were going to ask this question because everyone on podcast does. And I, I don't, I don't like the question simply because, because it's one of those ones where. Definitely depends. It depends on the, on the purpose behind a piece of content. So if we think of Instagram as top of funnel where people, people don't go on Instagram to be sold to, we can create like a flywheel of content. So we're constantly drip feeding this content in so that consumers can hit what Google would call the 7 11, 4. And that 7114 is that in order for someone to make a purchase in any industry, they need to have been familiar with us or have seen what we do for about seven hours across 11 touch points and four formats or locations before the consumer is ready to buy. And so by creating this flywheel and using Instagram, which would you believe has four formats, it has reels, it has stories, there are carousels and there are Instagram posts, what we can do is we can slowly pull people from pieces of content or searches onto our profile, grab their attention, and then we can over time hold that attention to get through that 7 11, 4 that Google always bangs on about in an attempt to, in the long term, push them onto our websites. So when I talk about the purpose of a piece of content, if we think, oh, okay, I want to enhance brand awareness, I want to get my content in front of people who don't know I already exist in Instagram terms. We would call this reach. And I would suggest very strongly that reels would be the way to go for this. So short form video content and then carousels with audio added would be a very close second. If we're posting content in order to achieve brand awareness and reach, it would be erroneous of us to expect that it's going to give us lots of website and link clicks. On the flip side, content that's been well designed to gather those link clicks and website visits is unlikely to get a large amount of reach because people aren't necessarily at that point in their journey, in their customer journey, their guest journey, or the funnel to do that. So that's simply by virtue of the fact that the type of engagement that we're asking for or that we're looking for is for someone to visit the profile so leave that piece of content and go to our website. Not to like it, to comment on it, to save it, to share it. And so in terms of the types of content that people should be, should be posting, it very much depends on what they're trying to achieve. And I would suggest a strong mix or a nice balanced mix between stuff that's going to get in front of people to start drawing them in. And then converting type content to get them onto our websites is the best way to go. So I always teach my students to write the value that they communicate first. What are they going to inform people? What are they, what are they giving? Hosts often go, what do you mean, value? I want them to come here. When they come here, I give them value. But giving them information that will help them decide whether or not you're right for them is valuable. Once that has been written, only then consider what the best format is. Whether that's a picture, then go and choose the picture, whether that's a video, whether it's talking ahead, speaking to camera, that type of thing. Because the mistake that hosts will often make is say, oh, I've got this pretty picture, what can I say about it? That's what I did at the beginning. Rather than approaching it as if you're a magazine editor and saying, I've got an article perfect for my readership, I'll give it to an editorial team who are then going to write a headline, Instagram terms. This would be the hook, because Instagram will only show at Most the first 125 characters of any given piece of text content. And they'll also give it to photojournalists and they'll give it to archivists, say, I need an image that backs this up. So that when we're stood in the supermarket queue and our eye falls on a magazine, we're drawn to an image, a scroll stopping image. We then see the headline, that's the hook. And we go, oh, I want to read, I want to read on a bit more. So we read the first little snippet on the front of the magazine and then at the end it will say full article on page seven. So we're receiving the value. That's the value we put in our captions is leading us to the call to action. So we then more inclined to pick up the magazine because it's our turn to pay, stick it on the conveyor belt and the editor's done its job well. So rather than think, oh, I need to create reels or I need to create carousels, I would begin with what's the value I'm giving to the people I want to book, what's going to help them make a decision and then what am I going to ask for in return for that value?
- [39:04]
Liam
I like that. I've never thought of it in that way, but you're absolutely right. Most people, me included, I go, oh, this is cool, I'll post that picture. Now think of the headline. Whereas you're saying actually approach it from a. What do we want our client, first of all, what is our aim? Is it to build reach? Is it to actually try and, you know, convert those who already we've already got reach to? But then also what do we want them to feel and therefore construct the post around that? Not just picking the picture. It's a really good way of looking at it. I hadn't thought of it. Like, like say a magazine does it. It's not just by accident they've picked what they've picked. There's a, there's a reason for it, isn't there?
- [39:46]
Paul Anderson
Yeah, and they've, they've reverse engineered the purchasing process. So if we think of Instagram as the magazine rack, the image or the video in the post is the front cover. That then leads people to go, oh, what does it say? Drawn to the hook that opens a curiosity loop or gets people intrigued or interested. Then they go on and they read, then they read more and then in return for that, we ask them to give us something back like or a follow or a comment or an emoji like this or to visit the link in bio. And it comes back to this, to this flywheel notion. And so both, all types of purpose for a piece of content across the kind of spectrum of what we're publishing work in combination. And I like the notion of a flywheel because flywheels will gather momentum and energy as they, as they spin. So if we think of content as the, as the fuel that keeps that wheel spinning, but we see the profile is the piece of the puzzle that converts that fuel into the guest's motion, then we start to begin to stand a chance of people giving us their hard earned cash because we create that flywheel. Oh, people are engaged, people are liking, people are commenting and well, then they go have a look at the profile, then they have a look at the profile again, then eventually they hit the link in bio. By the time we've given that report repeated content over and over and over again, by the time they get to our websites, by virtue of having them received targeted value, we would Then hope that when they land on the website, they only have three questions. Are there vacancies when I want to travel? Can I afford it? And where's the book now? Button by creating this constant stream. So it's a difficult question to answer in terms of what's better, what's not. There are lots of stats and data, but it's important that when people look at these stats and the data across Instagram is to recognize that half of the world's active cell phones are accessing Instagram at least once a month. And so there is a large data set, but as a result it's very, very broad. And it's important therefore to highlight that no two short term rental businesses are exactly the same and neither are the perfect guests and therefore neither are the audiences. And this comes back to the publish, Review, iterate, publish, Review, iterate, publish. Just, just hit post. Right back to the beginning, just hit post. If you don't hit post, you're not going to know what's going to work and what, what isn't. And therefore you can't improve. You can't move away from failures, for want of a less provoking word towards those successes.
- [42:29]
Liam
I got it. And not only people like a kind of like, hey, what should I do on Instagram? And if somebody goes, go and post a photo, they go, okay, I'll go and post photos. But ultimately, exactly what we said at the start of this podcast, it's about actually posting what works and consistently to convert those direct bookings. And actually that takes first of all starting that feedback loop of start putting stuff out there so you get that feedback loop and you see what works and you can actually dive into stuff. And it absolutely makes sense what you've said there of, of why it's important to define who it is and what the content is for. And think of it like you say a magazine cover before really diving in. So I want to leave some time for you to talk about obviously the bootcamp, which is, is really cool. Can you give us a story of how somebody's used Instagram to increase their direct bookings? And then can you link that as to how. Feel free to plug your, your bootcamp after that as well.
- [43:27]
Paul Anderson
Cool, good. It's free. So if I have an opportunity to give loads of more people loads more value, then that's brilliant. Let me think, who can I choose? So many to choose from. I'm going to choose Dina Harania. I think you know who Dina is. Dina Harania runs Amari Villa, which is in Kefalonia in Greece. And she originally was a one on one student of mine and she took the principles of perfect potential guest content pillars and a manageable, sustainable kind of cadence and calendar, and she, she landed £15,000 worth of bookings for one property in three months with just three posts per week. Amazing, right? I mean, she is absolutely a star student, which is why I, I do talk about Dina a lot because she's brilliant. And then about a year after we'd finished the one on one coaching, she came back to me and she went, that was awesome, Paul, it's been a year, what do I do now? And my response was, well, we, we need to, we need to improve, we improve your workflow so you can produce more content in the same amount of time or just take that extra time, have a cup of tea and we improve the quality of your content. So Dina then joins the Instabook training program and we analyzed the performance of her content from 2024. Now, Dina is a super, super diligent student, has a really strong work ethic. So she'd religiously followed my advice and recorded the performance of the 120 or so pieces of content that she published in 2024. And she recorded it consistently 24 hours after it was published. So we copy and pasted that spreadsheet somewhere else and when we sorted it with the top reach at the top of the spreadsheet, and then we did it again and did the most link clicks at the top of the spreadsheet, she's now in the process of rescheduling the top performing 20 25% from both categories, carbon copies of the originals, the next 2025% that performed well, but not Top of the Pops as such, she's looking at where she can improve it, making little tweaks to it, and the bottom 25, 30%. She's trying to analyze why it didn't perform well by comparing it to the content that we know performs. Or she's just going, I'm not doing that again, I'm going to do more of this. And so by regularly reviewing and iterating on the work that gave her that £15,000 in three months, she can't help but to keep winning. And I'm really excited to see the results she gets from this new wave of effort because a lot of people think that they need to come up with something new, something completely fresh every single time. And I think the best way to illustrate why people needn't worry about repeating or just making small adjustments in their content as they go is if we picture an account that has a thousand followers and they publish a piece of content and it reaches 500 people, 500 accounts. Pretty strong to be to, to be fair. So strong piece of content. Let's then assume that searchability, keywording, all that good stuff, the, the discoverability piece was really effective. And of those 500, 250 were non followers. Brand awareness. What that means though, by implication is of those thousand followers followers, only 250 of those followers even know that content exists. Still another 750 followers who've never seen that piece of content. So you can post it again. And if, if one of them comes back and go, oh, you did that three months ago, the chances of them being your perfect potential guest, I'll slim do none. You go, all right, fine, move on. I've, I've had people do it, I've had people do it to me several times. Come back. I don't know why you keep repeating content. I'm going to unfollow you now. Okay, this is not an airport. You don't need to announce your departure, just if you don't like it, it's free advice and go somewhere else, you know, and so we can, we can make small adjustments over time. We can make dramatic ones to test. And this is where Dean is going to take it next. By virtue of being able to carbon copy 30, 40 posts, she's now got that extra, extra time either to experiment or as I said, have a cup of tea that's cool and just destroy it.
- [47:59]
Liam
And ultimately how many, obviously those sort of results, how many people will be looking, going, well, is it, is it worth me spending the time, the effort? Well actually if you can do what she's done there and get these kind of Results, I mean 15,000 pounds of bookings in three months, direct bookings as well, straight Instagram track, no commission to, to the dreaded OTAs. And this is where it's worth people's time to, to pay attention to this, isn't it?
- [48:25]
Paul Anderson
I think it's worth people's time providing there's some sense of structure about it and there's some sense of framework. Dean is not, not, not. I mean she, she is an outstanding student. But I have other students who doubled website, doubled website visits in a month. I have another student who's just landed a 2,000 pound booking straight from a direct message. She sent them a link, they booked bang. But it was all built on the foundation, the perfect potential guest. And then building that strategic structure and so the free boot camp that I'm running, it'll be at the very end of April. It's going to be a five day boot camp. It will be, is designed and I'm just polishing it off now to give people that framework and structure so they can follow Dina's lead and with some application. Because if you, you know, it only works if you work it, hopefully repeat the results. So I intend to give hosts everything, essentially I now wish I had between when I started and chucking the towel in and that period before I was like, this is rubbish. So understanding how Instagram works and how we can leverage its business model, our own purposes, and then tangible, tactical, actionable steps that will help guide hosts to building that system to create content that a perfect potential guest will always appreciate. But importantly, to be able to do it on repeat and off the back end of that. A simple system, very simple system to understand the performance of content and improve upon it. So I don't really have a tagline, but in the back of my head I have this kind of notion of imagine knowing that everything you post targets an individual, is loved by them and it will always perform better than the last time you did it. That's, that's the sentiment that I want to give people when they come out of the Bootcamp. So it will literally guide people from perfect potential guest content pillars, how to build, build a calendar, talk about the editorial process of, of, of, of creating content, and then a way to measure what we're doing, because it could be that we put effort into Instagram and find out that our perfect potential guest doesn't like Instagram, doesn't go anywhere near it. And so it's important for me that I start with those fundamentals because they can be applied equally to Facebook, to YouTube, to blogs, to words on hero images, so that at least people have something. Even if they find out that they're not getting a return on investment from effort put into Instagram, they're not measuring it. They won't know. And it could be that Instagram isn't for their perfect potential guess and therefore isn't for them. And that's cool, too.
- [51:07]
Liam
That's cool because the Bootcamp is going to help them with that and we're going to make sure obviously this goes out before the Boot camp. So what is the best place for people to A, go and find out more about the boot camp? B, connect with you and then in a moment I'm going to get you to share one really big gem. So everybody needs to Stick around for that. But what are the details? How do we connect here and come find out more about the bootcamp?
- [51:34]
Paul Anderson
So about the Bootcamp specifically, people are interested and they want to learn how to systemize how to drive traffic from Instagram and see that all important return on investment. I have a wait list running. It's thesocialmediahotelier.com for likes ain't cash, because likes are not cash. So the social media hotel.com lac I will have to limit spots because zoom will only ever allow me 100 people into one of the Zoom rooms at a time. So those that are on the wait list will get the first access in. And I'm working on a few extra bonuses for those who then go on to join the boot camp. Not quite sure what they're going to be yet, but I've got such a wealth of stuff to give. I go, okay, you can have this, you can have this, you can have this, you can have that. For those who aren't interested in systematizing what they're doing and measuring the results so that they can improve, best place to find me is on Instagram. I would be living a lie if I wasn't on Instagram as an Instagram T shirt for short term rental business businesses and hosts. And so my handle is at the social media hotelier.
- [52:46]
Liam
Awesome. Thank you so much, Paul. I mean, I've picked up a lot of knowledge and it always astounds me because I kind of feel I know a social media platform to a degree, but it's very generalist. As soon as I dive into a conversation like this, I'm like, oh my God, I, I can spend more time here. There's more potential that I'm not capitalizing on as a host. And hopefully everybody listening to this today feels the same. If you'd like to carry on the conversation, you can come and join us in the Facebook group. There's a free Facebook group called the Hospitality Community Myself and there's many hosts in there. And you can come and ask questions about either this podcast or just ask general hospitality questions. But before we go, Paul, what is a final takeaway? If a host is listening to this right now, today, what's one thing that they can do to improve either their Instagram or their direct bookings? What would that be? And anything else you'd like to leave our guests with?
- [53:45]
Paul Anderson
I do, I do bang on. And I have banged on about this a lot today. Understand who, who do you like hosting? Who is your perfect potential guest? And that could come from past guests. It could come from saying, right, I'm perfect for groups and families, but the families who stay with me have young children like I do. You just create a God awful mess. And I'd rather have a group of mid-30s people. Okay, so who amongst that group is going to be the one with the credit card making the decision and identify who you. Who makes your life easier and therefore who can you serve best? Because if we target a perfect potential guest, we can manage their expectations before they even arrive at our doors. And if we manage those expectations, it then becomes remarkably easy to exceed them. And once we exceed those expectations, they're the ones who essentially become our free sales force. They tell their friends, they tell their relatives, they tell TripAdvisor, they write the reviews, they come back. And the same applies to the way that we market. So if we can attract the people that we are, that we love to host, the ones that we'd be happy. I forget who came up with the phrase, like, would you be happy to go for a beer with them? I don't drink beer. But would you be happy to go for a beer with them? Then if you target them, then you stand a chance of cutting through the content marketing noise. And it's a really noisy space, really, really noisy space. So that if your content talks to the individual and your profile is optimized to grab their attention, we are perfect for you and you are perfect for us, and you do that quickly, then we stand a chance of taking people from the top of the funnel, through the flywheel of our content, out through the link in bio. And as soon as they hit that link in bio, they are giving us the undivided attention. And attention is absolutely the new oil, the new gold, the new black, doesn't matter what you want to call it, it's all driven from attention. Grab the attention, hold it, and then redirect it where you want it to go.
- [56:00]
Liam
Amazing. Thank you so much for your time today, Paul.
- [56:04]
Paul Anderson
I love this. I love doing podcasts so much. In fact, I'm doing a few on the bounce. So everyone should stand by and if people do tune into all of them, hopefully there's not too much overlap, but inevitably there will be.
- [56:16]
Liam
Well, thank you so much and look forward to having you on again in two, three years time and seeing the journey and the update.
- [56:22]
Paul Anderson
Then let's do it sooner than that. Let's do it sooner than that.
- [56:25]
Liam
Let's do it sooner than that. Thanks again. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks for listening pleasure.
- [56:29]
Paul Anderson
Thank you so much for your time, Liam. Appreciate.