#VisitBritain – best practice social media!

It was announced this week that VisitBritain has partnered STA Travel to jointly market Britain as a tourist destination for the youth market over the next four years.

The deal between the two parties is worth over £2.8 million and will help boost visitor numbers to the country, capitalising on the unique opportunities provided by the recent Royal Wedding, next year’s Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London 2012 Games.

This led me to having a look at VisitBritain’s marketing activity over recent years and it would seem that they’re taking the social media world by storm! They have over half a million ‘Likes’ on Facebook and they totally dominated the social media Royal Wedding coverage:

The tourist board’s @VisitBritain Twitter page entered the top 1% of influential Twitter users for the period 29-31 April, according to Klout, the accepted standard measure of influence for the medium.
In addition, LoveUK, VisitBritain’s Facebook page, was the 6th most ‘explosive page’ on Facebook during Royal Wedding week according to All Facebook, which assesses activity on the social networking site.

Discussions started by @VisitBritain and mentions of Royal Wedding articles on the VisitBritain Super Blog, reached more than 2m people in 48 hours, giving it a Twitter Klout score of over 71.
In the five-day lead up to and during the Royal Wedding VisitBritain gained 127,546 new Facebook fans, almost doubling the LoveUK membership to over 255,000, with the content viewed by over 1.3m people.
A global audience of over 2bn people watched the ceremony, with VisitBritain content shown by key broadcasters around the world and VisitBritain staff conducted broadcast interviews that were shown around the world.  Visits to the online VisitBritain Media Centre and Royal Britain section doubled within a week and many international broadcasters were hosted on trips around the Britain.

It seems to me that VisitBritain really know what they’re doing when it comes to social media.  Luckily for us Justin Reid, VisitBritain’s Head of Digital is joining our Social Media focus day at Loyalty World 2011…

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