Please follow the link below to view my introduction video.

Blog 4 Introduction video

Video Shot using Sony A7 & A6 camera systems, edited using DaVinci Suite.

If you’ve gotten this far through my bog posts and are interested in either creating a travel blog or are a tourism/hospitality operator that wishes to get the most out of social media marketing, today’s update is for you.

If you’re here, you probably already have either a webpage or a social media page, be it Facebook, Instagram or blog. As with all things business related, you need to see a tangible figure that translates customer interaction with real-life dollar increases in revenue for time/money spent on social media.

A way to conceptualize these figures is through social media analytics. They sound daunting and time consuming, but they really don’t have to be. Without physically asking your customers or prospects what they like and don’t like about your online offerings, I will give you a brief run-down on tools that you can use to better the online experience for your target audience and to turn those clicks into revenue, so you can spend more time operating your business and less time worrying about social media.

Ultimately, you want people looking at and engaging with your content online. If they aren’t engaging with it, being liking, following, sharing or commenting, your message and brand might not be getting through to the market and could result in you losing real market reach and therefore income in the long term.

 

Facebook:

The first and most commonly used option is Facebook. On the surface it is a free, easy option for a business to present their services to the world. To put it into perspective, over 2 billion people use Facebook actively every day. That’s a lot of potential customers you could be accessing. But it’s not just good enough to have a Facebook page, with a couple of photos and customer reviews and leave it at that.

Facebook has a fantastic advertising arm of its business portal, one that I have been using successfully for a few years now to promote business and to drive clicks through to landing pages for customers sites, with the aim to increase click-through and sales rates. However, it isn’t what it used to be in terms of free-to-play features. Like all things in life, you get what you pay for.

That’s right, this will cost you money.

But, don’t despair. You can choose your daily spend, with recommended and customised spends to get your business advertised to your target market efficiently and on budget.

The tools included allow you to see how many people accessed your page, liked, commented, shared and returned. What day, what time of day they accessed your page and from where they accessed it from (both geographically in the world and whether they found it through an organic search in a search engine, or by clicking through advertisements).

Reviewing these statistics at least twice a week will keep your finger on the pulse of your Facebook page and will allow you to keep on top of content submissions and new trends that could drive business to your site.

Facebook posts, like the other posts in this blog, need to be relevant and engaging. People lose their train of thought quickly and in this day and age, need an instant sense of gratification or dopamine release, otherwise they lose interest. Facebook posts are no different. Whether they are a link to YouTube for a video you’ve shot, an interesting photographic post or customer reviews, they need to be well set out, easily read and engaging for them to be consumed. Lastly, try to aim for at least 3 updates per week as a minimum. Don’t spam your page and keep the Candy Crush scores off your business page.

YouTube:

YouTube is a funny one. Did you know that YouTube is the second largest search engine after google? Well you do now! People search for nearly everything on here and as such, you should be making a concerted effort to submit engaging vlogs and video clips to entice your potential customers to your business.

Much the same as Facebook, YouTube allows you to see geographical, time sensitive statistics on your videos. It also allows you to see what is popular and what is not, in terms of what you are submitting. Also, as an added feature, you are able to make money from the videos you produce, so if you make regular popular uploads that have many followers, you could realistically generate a secondary income stream for your business to take advantage of.

The aim of you putting up YouTube content is for it to be engaging and relevant. If the viewer isn’t sold on the title within the first few seconds, you’ve lost the viewer, likely never to return to your video or page. If, however, you manage to keep their gnat-like attention span, you may be rewarded with a sale, a referral or the consumer sharing your video on social media, or leaving a comment.

 

Instagram:

Often tied in with Facebook is Instagram. Both owned by Facebook, but used in slightly different ways. Instagram focuses heavily on sharing photographs and short film clips as a means to get their message across to the target audience. In the same way that Facebook does, you can monetise your account and use it as an advertising medium and as a result, are able to use the same analytic software available through Facebook.

If you need something to manage all at once, something to make your social media analytics tasks easier in the long run, software such as Hoot suite is your best bet. Yes, it costs your money, but you should be spending to keep up to date with your social media efforts or risk falling behind in current trends, CRM activities and overall market engagement.

Very much like Facebook, Instagram is based on getting the consumer to interact with your photographs. If you want your analytics to show you an increase in click through, call to action or completion rates, the way you use the application will determine how many people visit your site. Be they tour/scenic shots, promotional video clips or discount offers, your content needs to be engaging and need to be consistent (quality, brand narrative & frequency of updates) to be relevant to an easily distracted world audience.

For example, if you’re a tour operator for 20-30 year olds, pictures of young people o tour having fun, snorkeling, bike riding, eating food, drinking beer – these are all things you would want to put in your feed on a consistent basis. Pictures of you getting too drunk on a night out (when you should be looking after a tour group), videos of irrelevant content or irregular uploads of poor quality will all lose you subscribers and will stop people coming to your page to begin with.

Day One:

Flying into Rijeka Airport is an easy feat, with many small carriers and budget airlines (see Ryanair, EasyJet) flying into the region. The airport itself is not in the town site of Rijeka, it’s on Krk island, but that is no hassle. Arriving at the airport, you have the option of taxi, bus, ferry and private vehicle rentals. Personally, I like riding a motorcycle on holidays in order to get the best experience possible and this is available through Rocker Motorcycle Rental. They have packages ranging from €430 to €1.330 for the week, which is extremely reasonable.

 

Whilst in Krk, spend the day exploring the many beaches and winding roads with your newly fuelled up motorcycle. You could head to one of the many beautiful coves and beaches adorning the island, such as Stara Baska, or you could head into the town of Vrbnik and ride as many of the small, winding roads as you can, until you reach your accommodation and a local kafana to eat and drink for the evening.

Vrbnik is an easy town to find accommodation, with Airbnb posting a large number of independently operated apartments and houses for you to stay in (Check out Airbnb.com.au for more information).

Day Two:

Leaving Krk for the mainland is no issue as there is a bridge connecting the two. Which makes the days’ activities a piece of cake. Opting to travel the southern coastal route, located inland approximately 140km from Vrbnik is the Plitvice Lakes National Park. Known for being a UNESCO world heritage site with excellent hiking tracks and natural beauty, the location is an easy morning ride to explore away from the usual tourist filled booze cruises that pepper the archipelago.

In the afternoon, return to the coast by riding southwest to Pag, stopping eventually in Novalja for the evening. Novalja is home to one of Europe’s best party beaches and you will find no shortage of food and entertainment for the evening.

Day Three:

Whilst you’re in Pag, you may as well sample the local cheeses the island is famous for and enjoy the fresh Adriatic Sea air while you make your way back up the coast toward Opatija.

Spend the rest of your day trying local beers and rakija at one of the many Kafana in the town (Opatija) and relax by the sea for a difficult day four.

 

Day four:

I hope you opted for an adventure touring motorcycle, because if you didn’t need it before today, you definitely do now! North west of Opatija is Cicarija, located partly in the Ucka nature park. Get up nice and early and take the bike through its paces up the mountain roads to some of the many historical sites present and begin to make your way south along the coast toward the ferry terminus at Brestova.

From there, you can take a ferry across to the island of Cres. I would recommend the little drive further to stay in the village of Beli for the evening, before heading further south on day five.

 

Day Five:

Enjoy the day, take your time exploring Cres and make your way down toward the town of Losinj (different island and fun fact is separated from Cres by an 11m gap at Osor). Losinj offers a great deal of historical offerings, from architecture to artwork. There is also a great deal of beaches to lounge on and kafana to frequent for some delicious local fare.

If by now you haven’t already done so, local eateries like Konoba Dispet are an excellent way to get traditional local food, with delicious local wines and beers. You won’t break the bank eating there and the flavours and atmosphere will be better than many of the higher priced parts of the island. Head to Facebook and take a look at their business page at https://www.facebook.com/KonobaDispet/.

 

Day six:

Jump back on that bike and track back to the mainland via the ferry you arrived on. Take the short but refreshing ride back up the Kvarner coast toward Rijeka. Here in this beautiful port city, you will find much of the same friendly Croatian hospitality you’ve become accustomed to over the past week as well as some excellent architecture to check out before your last day. A place of interest in the city is the Trsat Fortress or Trsat Gradina. It’s a medieval castle set above the city proper and offers great views of the bay, as well as the city itself.

Day Seven:

Enjoy your last few hours riding back to Krk for your departing flight. Croatia has so much more to offer, but for a relaxing motorcycling holiday in the Kvarner region, sampling local beers, wines and food doesn’t get much better than this!

Please follow me on Facebook and Instagram @kvarnervreme to keep up do date on my travels through the kvarner region and beyond, as I attempt to take in all the major highways in the Balkans!

 

Dovidjienja!

If you’re looking for a cheaters guide to travel in the Kvarner region of Croatia, I’ve got you covered. Travel these days isn’t like it used to be. We are an open and reasonably well travelled generation who has either evolved with the internet and social media, or have had it from the jump. As such we have access to information and experiences like never before.

So, given these facts, why scour hours of Trip Advisor reviews and foreign language websites when you could simply come here and let me do the hard work for you!

In today’s post, I’m going to go through some of the blogs on the region and let you know whether or not they’re worth your precious time.

Let’s get this thing going.

 

1. Guardian Blog:

https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2016/aug/28/croatia-kvarner-gulf-family-road-trip-cres-krk-rab

 

Look. This is fine if you’re a middle-aged, upper-middle class traveller who has a decent amount of disposable income to throw at morning liquor tastings with their 13-year old. But this isn’t the target market of this blog, is it?

The writing style is reminiscent of dad after he watched too many episodes of Rick Stein in Italy and got stuck into the vino. If you’ve got the money and want to traipse around filling your gullet with bathtub booze and cakes, this might tickle your fancy, but I think we can do better. Also, the photographs are as appealing as a jog the night after a bottle of rakija, a little more time put into those could have saved the visual appeal of the site.

 

2. Travel Associates Blog:

https://www.travel-associates.com.au/luxury-holidays-news/kvarner-bay-croatia

 

This is a bit better. I know a lot of you love boats and cruising. I get it, the allure of floating on the open ocean, amazing sunsets without having to contend with high-rise buildings or beach loads of other tourists. The first thing you notice here is that the writer took a little bit more time with their camera setup and threw some photos in that truly showed what to expect from a sailing perspective. Unfortunately, that’s as good as it gets.

If you’re expecting to find out about some truly local delicacies or back alley places for a nice tipple, this is about adventurous as nan swapping bridge for bingo on a Tuesday arvo.

 

3. Chasing the Donkey Blog:

https://www.chasingthedonkey.com/kvarner-region-katarina-line-croatia-cruise/

 

Now we’re getting somewhere. Along the same lines as before, boats, booze and food. Good stuff. Except this time, it’s someone not trying to fill a corporate word count with escapades and culinary tastes so vanilla that Streets is trying to sue you for the recipe.

If you’re like me and you have a small family, this is a much better option. The writer has nice photos (they aren’t going to wow Nat Geo, but they don’t look like they were shot on an iPhone after its fifth dive into a pub toilet) and more importantly, short, sharp pointers on things to do and see.

Sure, this isn’t going to be Lonely Planet, balls to the wall back alley sort of stuff, but compared to the last two entries, it is the Indiana Jones of the list. More child friendly (no liquor offers for the kids here) and gives a nicely rounded itinerary that both small families, couples and singles could follow without missing out on their journey.

(As a side note, Chasing the Donkey Doesn’t allow photographs from their site to be shared, so here’s a photograph of A boat in the Kvarner region)