At Norwegian, we believe social media is a strong channel for driving demand, however in order to do so we must first create engaging & inspiring content. Instagram is an ideal social media channel for publishing inspirational content, given its nature & focus on imagery. In addition, Instagram continues to be one of the fastest growing social media platforms. Our goal for Instagram in 2017 was to expand the size of our community by 20%, but in to do so we needed to craft a tailored social strategy for the platform.
In order to increase our community size, we implemented multiple strategies over the course of 2017, most notably:
- Significantly increased the amount of (UGC) we posted on our pages. UGC allowed us to showcase the experience of cruising on our ships in an authentic way that resonates with our fans. Additionally, sharing UGC allowed us to incentivize and thank our fans for contributing their positive experiences by displaying their work to hundreds of thousands of users.
- Created a singular, uniform aesthetic for our content that helped to capture and evoke the strong emotions of cruising in a manner that would appeal to both cruisers and those yet-to-cruise. With vibrant colors and splashy lighting, we edited every single photo and video to immerse fans in the same enchanting, rich emotions they would be able to experience at sea.
- Implemented a custom hashtag strategy for our Instagram account utilizing a vast range of hashtags related to our products and the content we shared. This strategy provided an additional method for users with similar interests as our current fans to organically discover our account.
- Engaged with users on Instagram in real time on our account and public posts related to our brand. By increasing our resources, we were able to broaden our ability to engage users.
As a result of these efforts, we experienced record growth and engagement on Instagram in 2017:
- Our number of followers increased over 50% year over year.
- We had the highest annual growth rate amongst all of our major cruise line competitors.
