Fan Content: How to Leverage Your Fans to Enhance Your Social Media

Do you want your fans to help market you?

Are you wondering how to include fan content in your social media?

To explore how fan content can enhance your social media, I interview Jesse Desjardins for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Jesse Desjardins. Jesse is the head of social at Tourism Australia, where he manages a small team that oversees large Facebook, Instagram and Google+ communities. Working with fans, Jesse's team receives over 1000 images from fans a day!

Jesse shares how he and his team leverage fan content--specifically photos--to promote Australian tourism.

You'll discover how Jesse and his three-person team have grown Facebook to 6M fans and Instagram to 800K fans to reach 3M to 6M people a day.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Fan Content
How Jesse got started at Tourism Australia

Jesse shares that while he was working at a small advertising agency in the U.S. in 2004, he went to Australia on holiday for a month and fell in love with the country. He ended up getting a job and staying.

After four years, he returned to the U.S. and was working in advertising doing campaigns for celebrity perfumes when he realized he'd left a brand he loved—Australia and travel.

For the next two years, Jesse spent time on SlideShare doing things like You Suck at PowerPoint.

During that time he also put up proposals for people to send him money to attend festivals like SXSW and Cannes Lion in exchange for his notes and photos. Jesse says that gave him a good foundation for how to build community.

When he saw a job open up for social media manager at Tourism Australia, he sent his résumé, but he knew he needed to do something more. He put his résumé on SlideShare that night and the next morning, it had 40k views and a lot of supportive comments.

Listen to the show to find out how Twitter helped Jesse get his résumé into the hands of Tourism Australia's managing director.

What Tourism Australia's job is and how promoting tourism has changed

Jesse explains that Tourism Australia is basically the marketing agency for tourism in Australia. His team promotes tourism to the country as a whole and also works with the different states and international offices.

He says that advocacy and word-of-mouth have always played a role in promoting any industry, especially travel. Tourism Australia had started a Facebook page before he joined the organization; however, it took them three years to hit 1M fans.

Jesse shares that he took a look at what had already been done and made the decision to launch Instagram, Google+ and Twitter as well and he's ramped it up ever since.

Listen to the show to hear how Jesse views the return on social media for Tourism Australia.

The strategy behind Tourism Australia's social media

Jesse's social media strategy has a couple of components.

He says the first component is to build something that gets bigger over time. Jesse explains that in traditional advertising, the work tends to focus on big campaigns that you work on for 6 months, then launch. His approach for Tourism Australia is different. His team works on the small things that add value every single day.

As an example, he explains that instead of running a big campaign or contest to grow Instagram quickly, they've grown the account slowly over the past two years by posting consistently. He says this has been a good way to use the small resources they have to perfect the system to ...