How Contiki uses social media

A few days ago I did a post on how Topdeck uses social media. Let's now delve into how one of their main competitors, Contiki, use social media. Contiki targets the same demographic offering tours for 18-35 year olds. Founded in 1961 it offers tours throughout six of the seven continents.

Lets have a look at how they use their social media platforms:

FACEBOOK

Contiki have 732,475 people who like their page and 715,344 people who follow it. That means just over 17k people unfollowed the page as they were not interested in the content they post. They have almost double the amount of followers compared to Topdeck which is impressive. They use their Facebook page to share their blog posts, videos and images.

Contiki has been promoting recently how Norway has been voted the number 1 happiest place on earth. They have been sharing blog posts and videos that are relevant to this. They haven't really received a lot of engagement with this campaign with only 2.1k viewing the video and 14 people liking it. The post they shared with their blog post only received 24 likes. 

It isn't surprising that they are sharing a blog post promoting solo travel as they are known to be a good company to travel with by yourself as there are usually quite a lot of others doing the same. This post didn't receive a lot of engagement either with only 15 likes and 2 shares.

Their post to try and gain more reach by encouraging engagement and their followers to tag their friends was successful with 652 reacting to it and 166 people sharing it. This was their most popular recent post. I am surprised by the lack of engagement and lack of interesting content on their Facebook page. Contiki travels to a massive range of countries and has over 300 tours so I expected their Facebook page to have a lot of engagement and full of interesting posts.

INSTAGRAM

Contiki have over 222k followers on Instagram and they have implemented a feature where you can shop tours to countries they have posted on their feed by clicking the link in their bio. This is a fantastic feature and makes it easier for a potential customers to narrow down tours they could go on. 

Not a day goes by that we don't think about running away to Dubrovnik 📸 @beckvee

A post shared by Contiki (@contiki) on Sep 20, 2017 at 12:06am PDT

Much like Topdeck their Instagram feed is full of posts they have shared from people who have travelled on Contiki. It's an effective way to get free advertising by asking travellers on tours to post photos and tag Contiki for the chance to be featured on their Instagram.

Haters will say it's fake. Locals will say that's just classic Byron Bay. 📷 @alittlebitoflottie

A post shared by Contiki (@contiki) on Sep 18, 2017 at 3:23am PDT

PINTEREST

Much like Topdeck, Contiki uses Pinterest to 'inspire' travellers. They have boards for travel locations, memes, quotes, DIY projects related to travel, tips and hacks etc. Like Topdeck, Contiki doesn't seem to be very active on Pinterest which is where they could be missing out on a potential platform to connect with new customers.

GOOGLE+

Contiki have actually only stopped used Google+ 16 weeks ago compared to Topdeck who stopped using it back on the 28th May 2016.

Their two most recent posts didn't receive any engagement which could be why they stopped using the platform.... who even uses Google+ now anymore?

TWITTER

Contiki has 31.7k followers on Twitter which is just over 11k more followers than Topdeck.

Like this campaign that they have shared on Facebook they are not receiving a lot of engagement on Twitter from it either..... They should maybe take this as a hint when putting together content to post.

This was their most recent post that had the most engagement with 5 retweets and 22 likes. This shows that this is the sort of content their followers on Twitter would like to see. They should take this feedback on board when planning content to post on Twitter. They don't seem to use Twitter to promote their tours much which is surprising as that is what the business is. 

YOUTUBE

YouTube could be a great platform for Contiki to promote their trips to potential customers. They could collaborate with YouTube influencers to help grow their YouTube channel. The fact that their last YouTube video was uploaded was 3 months ago makes me wonder why they have stopped posting videos so frequently. Compared to Topdeck on YouTube they have posted a lot more frequently within the past year. 

They have 67k subscribers on YouTube which is significantly a lot more than Topdeck which is strange that they do not use that platform more to promote their tours. The video above only received 1,369 views but in the description it said they would release a new vlog every Thursday... which they haven't kept doing. 

SNAPCHAT

Contiki do have a snapchat account however there has not been any content posted on there for at least a week since I added them. This is odd considering it is a platform that their target demographic use quite a lot so they are missing out on the opportunity to connect with future customers through there.

TUMBLR

Look I'm as surprised as anyone when I realised Contiki had a Tumblr account which they use frequently. It makes sense as people (mainly teenagers) use Tumblr for inspiration or to look at pretty photos. It shows that there are across as many social media platforms as they can be considering their main competitor, Topdeck, does not have a Tumblr account.