Table of Contents
Background
The annual Tourism INDABA, – “… one of the largest tourism marketing events on the African calendar and one of the top three ‘must visit’ events of its kind on the global calendar” – is taking place from 9-11 May 2015.
TourismSA, South African government’s official tourism arm and owner of the INDABA, has successfully run an associated marketing campaign called #MeetSouthAfrica since 2013.
This campaign’s main aim is exposing South African tourism to the world, and it cleverly leverages a combination of high-profile local and international bloggers to showcase holiday spots from all corners of the country through online content in the main format of pictures, videos and blog posts.
Typically, the campaign starts 1 week before the Tourism INDABA.
About #MeetSouthAfrica campaign
We started tracking #MeetSouthAfrica from 2014 when it popped up on our social media tracking radar as one of the most engaging topics at the time.
We participated in the social network discussions and even we blogged about it, and we were so glad we did.
The success of #MeetingSouthAfrica 2014 lead us to conclude that it was the biggest influencer marketing campaign success of the year from a South African perspective, and we were right.
#MeetSouthAfrica 2015
@The_eNitiaters lots to go around :)
— JD ANDREWS (@earthXplorer) May 7, 2015
The high-profile bloggers are back in town and have been visiting South Africa’s exquisite holiday spots since 30 April 2015.
The beautiful pictures on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram tell a thousand words.
We suspect the whole tourism sector is filled with envy, we certainly can’t stop admiring the impressive display.
While this year’s international blogger contingent does not seem to be as large as 2014, the campaign’s mechanics are similar.
We have also been doing our part as patriotic South Africans here at eNitiate, engaging with the campaign’s bloggers and tracking performance of 2015 campaign with our various analytics tools.
Let’s share some of the top-line stats with you on the eve of this year’s INDABA.
#MeetSouthAfrica analytics
As we pointed out in one of our #MeetSouthAfrican tweets, this campaign is great for TourismSA’s social network community growths.
In this #MeetSouthAfrica Twitter Top Contributors table, we recognise 3 bloggers who were participating in 2014 as well, and 2 of them are the top 2 most active contributors.
Our assessment
Despite #MeetSouthAfrica 2015 not being as big online as last year – if Google search results for MeetSouthAfrica search phrase are anything to go by, the value of this campaign as part of Tourism INDABA continues to be noticeable.
We are not so sure if #MeetSouthAfrica will be the biggest influencer marketing campaign of 2015.
We will keep our finger on the social network pulse and make a pronouncement on review of the year.
