Tourism Harrison started a campaign in 2016 to work with the smaller businesses in the community to see if they could get their online traffic up, which was quite successful, especially in the initial phase.
“We called it Break the Algorithm, that was the name of the campaign, and we had a workshop in the spring with all the smaller businesses to see if we could get it going. The hash tag was “just up the road” which has become extremely successful in getting people to talk about Harrison,” said Executive Director for Tourism Harrison, Robert Reyerse, at a recent Village council meeting.
During that program Tourism Harrison’s Facebook likes went up about 1300, Instagram roughly 660, and twitter another 165, but most importantly their posts went up a staggering 4 million times.
“Our posts showed up about 4 million times and that’s pretty significant — that gets people thinking about Harrison, we had loop videos that were part of the program and were viewed over 320,000 times, and that’s where it really starts to get effective,” said Reyerse.
Visitors started to use the “just up the road” hash tag.
“The hash tag was used by visitors 3800 times to tag their pictures and then we would have different filters to pick them up, and then we take those pictures and put them on our Facebook pages, and then on to our website and that gets visitors to Harrison, and much more engaged with the community,” he said.
According to Reyerse, it’s really become the new marketing model, on how to get visitors to become the champion for your product.