Northern Ireland & CrowdRiff take on UGC one post at a time

18th May 2022

Categories: Our News

“Giant adventure” awaits in Northern Ireland. From cosy hotels, lodges, and world-class visitor attractions, to the award-winning food and drink scene, Northern Ireland is one destination that has all bases covered for an adventurous traveller. 

The destination marketing organisation (DMO), Tourism Northern Ireland, promotes the motto, “We’re Good to Go” — encouraging all who visit to explore beautiful Northern Ireland with confidence. The DMO relied on user generated content (UGC) to paint an epic picture of the essence of the destination across social media, with hopes to encourage more potential visitors to “go” as well. But when the previous UGC platform Tourism Northern Ireland used wasn’t delivering on quality content, the DMO turned to CrowdRiff. 

GOAL: 

Tourism Northern Ireland’s goal was to improve the experience of its online audience and enhance its own virtual storytelling by:

• Locating and displaying high quality, fresh UGC content across social media channels 
• Eliminating manual searches on social media and avoiding the hassle of obtaining rights
•  Ensuring website visitors are served with compelling content shot by real tourists, rather than content staged by the tourist boards

CHALLENGES:

The DMO faced challenges when searching for suitable UGC to share across social channels, especially when it came to searching for a particular subject or topic. There was an existing struggle to serve content that gave the website visitor or social media follower a sense of “I could be doing that.” Another challenge was for the UGC to be relevant for each of the different topics throughout the site, for example, searches for golf, food and drink, family, outdoors, pets, “Game of Thrones,” etc. In addition to the challenges faced when finding quality UGC, Tourism Northern Ireland encountered issues with its previous UGC platform when it came to accessing the Instagram application programming interface (API).

 “We made particular use of it during the lockdowns, encouraging users to share local spots to help us keep our social channels populated with relevant, engaging, and appropriate content.”

Sarah Sneddon, Social & Digital Marketing Officer, Tourism Northern Ireland

RESULTS: 

To date, Tourism Northern Ireland has seen the following benefits from using CrowdRiff: 

• Access to 95k pieces of relevant content and 126k high-quality assets to search through and share 
• UGC contributed an additional 1.3k assets to the library, including 1k pieces of content from the collector tool
• Website average visit duration and pages per visit increased 6.4 and 2.3 times more when individuals interacted with the gallery