Excerpt from PhocusWire
The job? Visiting some of the world's great cities while posting videos of your travels. The pay? $10,000 a month for three months, plus a $7,500 travel allowance.
"If this sounds like a dream job, that's because it is," reads the job posting on LinkedIn by Blueground, which offers furnished apartments to rent for a month or longer around the globe.
A gimmick? While the callout has won an outsized level of publicity for the 10-year-old company, the promotion provides another high-profile example of the travel sector's efforts to embrace social commerce – both to build brand affinity and, maybe someday, boost bookings and sales.
It's a move industry experts like Phocuswright researcher Robert Cole believe is overdue. In his recent report Influencers and Social Commerce in Travel, Cole warns of how a changing digital advertising landscape threatens to leave travel behind.
A greater focus on data privacy and increasing restrictions on third-party cookies are making digital advertising more cost prohibitive. Meanwhile, social media's importance keeps growing, at least for some business sectors. By some projections, U.S. social commerce will more than double from $37 billion in 2021 to $80 billion in 2025.
"The fashion and beauty industries are already far ahead of travel in social commerce, making considerable headway and reaping the benefits," Cole wrote in the report. "Travel marketers must take note, or risk losing further ground."
The message is already out. Travel companies have been turning to video-sharing app TikTok to build brand awareness. As the most downloaded app two years in a row, TikTok promises global reach, especially with younger generations of travelers.
"We're big believers in the platform," said Matt Clarke, vice president of North America marketing for Kayak. "The numbers don't lie. It seems like a smart thing to go where [an estimated 138 million U.S. users] are. At Kayak, our goal is always to entertain, to inform, to delight, and TikTok as a platform does that exceptionally well."
Booking.com, Expedia.com, Airbnb and others have all made social media an integral part of their marketing efforts. Blueground saw the same potential while developing its plan to hire a summer content creator.
"We've recently launched our TikTok channel, and we wanted to give it a boost," said chief marketing officer Yorgos Kleivokiotis. "What better way than reaching out to the experts: creators that have been using the platform for a long time and can produce interesting content that brings our apartments to life."
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