While travellers may not be able to visit New York City during the pandemic, their memories in the city remain timeless. As one of the most popular destinations for overseas trips, the city of New York carries numerous valuable travel memories of Chinese tourists. To stay connected with our audience and rekindle their love for the city, we launched the #FlahsbackToMyNYCTrip# UGC campaign on Weibo, encouraging our followers to share their travel experiences and unique stories in NYC.
Our Objectives
Enhance NYC's social presence on Weibo and promote a positive city image of NYC during and after the campaign.
Improve the audience engagement on Weibo by 50% and attract new followers by 5000 during the campaign.
Promote NYC’s famous attractions by encouraging and reposting user-generated content and cultivate future travel intent in Chinese travellers.
The Strategy
As the travel restriction and global pandemic continue, there’s a growing concern about travelling to the U.S. on Chinese social media, bringing challenges to NYC & Co, the Travel Destination Marketing Organization of New York City, in maintaining an active and positive social image.
To meet the challenge, we had launched a UGC campaign on Weibo to create an emotional appeal to our audience by encouraging them to share personal stories and real travel experiences in NYC.
By encouraging user-generated content, we were able to remind those who have visited New York City of their pleasant memories of the city and further engaged with them in the campaign. For those who haven’t travelled to NYC, the campaign brought an opportunity to take a virtual tour of the city through photos shared by real tourists, meeting their expectations of travelling abroad and cultivating their future travel to NYC.
The Execution
The UGC campaign was launched on Weibo in May 2020, and when our audience began to show interest again in planning future trips. By launching the social campaign, we were able to build a connection with our audience - even though they can’t actually travel to NYC temporarily. However, they can get some new inspirations for their future visits.
We released a promotion post to encourage our audience to share the photos or videos of their fondest NYC trip moments on their own Weibo account. We also prepared a special prize for the post that received the most likes to encourage engagement. Each qualified social entry post was reposted by NYC & Co’s official Weibo account to enhance the audience reach and generate social buzz on Weibo.
To boost the campaign, we also created a hashtag #FlahsbackToMyNYCTrip# on Weibo and encourage our participants to tag with the hashtag in their social posts, this brought the campaign instant promotion to other potential audiences. Moreover, the hashtag is hosted by NYC & Co, permanently linking the hashtag and related keywords to drive traffic to NYC & Co’s official Weibo account. This was able to maintain a positive social presence for NYC on Weibo during and after the campaign.
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