You may have heard about live streaming apps already, but have you ever wondered how to use something like Periscope or Facebook Live for your tour business?
Can it really be used to promote your tour and drive more sales??
In this video, I answer that question with a resounding yes! I’ll also explain why I think that tour guides are uniquely positioned to kick butt at live streaming and grow their potential customer base. Periscope is about to take the tourism industry by storm and I want you to be ready.
Not only will you get 6 tips on how to use periscope for your business, but I invite you to participate in the Be a Better Guide Periscope Challenge! Find me on Periscope just by searching for @BeaBetterGuide and ‘following’ my profile.
So what is this BABG Periscope Challenge?
Well, over the next 30 Days, I’m going to give you 30 Tour Leading Tips – all via Periscope! (And because hashtags are fun, we’re going with the hashtag #stopthebadguides ; )
I’ll be broadcasting live every day, for 10-15 minutes, and giving you one simple, practical tour-leading tip a day. Then I’ll hang around, take some questions and maybe even talk about my scoping experience.
Seems like a pretty easy way to see what this periscoping is all about and together we can figure out how it works and the best ways to use it in our businesses.
As a special insider tip, I want you to also add the user @SaveRome . This is the hugely popular account of Darius Arya and he does daily live broadcasts from the most famous sites of ancient Rome.
This is EXACTLY the type of thing you could be doing with your area, your tour and your expertise. Now Darius is an archaeologist and teacher, not a guide, but you will see just how he is using this tool to build a following and grow support for his project.
So, If you are interested in joining me on this challenge! Here is what you need to do, in three simple steps:
1) Download the periscope app onto your phone. Allow Periscope to send you notifications (just so you’ll see how the app actually works – you can change the notification settings at any time!)
2) Create an account (you can easily use your companies twitter account, your personal twitter account or just use a cell phone number. P.S. I highly recommend linking in a twitter account – there are a TON of benefits I can share with you later.
3) Navigate the app until you can search for users, and search @beabetterguide and then follow my profile. Then search for @saverome and follow Darius as well.
Now whenever either of us is live, Periscope will send you a notification and you can join in if you would like. If you can’t join live, don’t worry – you will still have 24 hours to view the replay at your convenience.
Finished Watching?
Download the Periscope App and follow me: @BeaBetterGuide for free tour guiding tips and regular live broadcasts!
Do you use Periscope already in your guiding business? Let me know in the comments how you use it or creative ideas you have for this new platform.
Transcript:
Hi there! Kelsey Tonner here from beabetterguide.com and if you can still hear my voice and can still see me, that means it’s okay to upload a video of yourself singing a famous Beatle song and that’s okay with YouTube.
Let’s dive in. We’re going to talk about Periscope today. What is it, how you can use it to promote your business, and why I think it’s going to be so important in selling more tours. Hopefully, you’ll stick around. We’ve got some great info.
Let’s start with the basic. Periscope is a live streaming sort of broadcasting app, and app is the keyword there. It’s something you download on your mobile device to your phone, your smartphone, or your iPad, or other sort of tablet things, and the important thing is that you have a camera.
When you broadcast, you’re able to use your front-facing camera or your rear-facing camera. But the key is you’re not broadcasting from your desktop, you’re doing it from your mobile device.
Simply put, this app enables you to go live by your mobile device and allows you to stream video and audio. Now, of course, you’re going to need a Wi-Fi connection or some sort of wireless internet connection to be able to broadcast this information out to the world of course.
The big way that makes it more interactive is that you can actually send comments back and forth. If I’m viewing your live stream, I can send in a comment which you also see as you’re streaming and so it allows for an interactivity which is really, really immediate. Very, very cool!
What happens after a live broadcast? Well, that’s a good question. After a broadcast is over, anyone but especially your followers will have 24 hours to view that broadcast.
They can come back and replay. You don’t need to be there live and after that 24-hour period, it’s taken off of the app. Now, that being said, if you did the broadcast yourself, that video that you made is saved to your device.
Basically, you have complete control over what that video does. You could upload it to YouTube if you want. You could upload it to Facebook. You could put it in a particular playlist. You have complete control over your scopes. But here is why I think this matters to you.
Tour guides, tour guide companies, activity operators and Periscope are match made in heaven because what’s happening right now is there’s hundreds and thousands of people, Periscope users around the world, who are being transformed into tour guides because they’re showcasing their everyday lives.
They’re showing neat experiences, neat events, concerts, all kinds of things. They’re acting as tour guides and they’re also proving that even the most benign or boring of activities in some part of the world are actually wildly fascinating to other people in other parts of the world.
Just an example, there’s a discovery section of Periscope. When you get the app, you can click the world map and you can scroll in-and-out and zoom and you can see all the live broadcast that are happening right now.
And just to get a sense of what’s out there, I’ve tuned in to live broadcasts of people that I don’t know and found out what teenagers do on Friday night in Kyrgyzstan.
And then I’ll close that down and quickly zip over to a dance party in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, and I can close that down and I witnessed a South Korean Thanksgiving party, so there were four generations of this South Korean family and it was all Korean.
I didn’t understand it, but it was incredible to be a part of that experience because they were live broadcasting it.
Now, I believe that we as tour guides are uniquely gifted to share and broadcast on Periscope these types of experiences. I mean this is literally our job. It’s what we do. We’re live in front of people. We need to be personable.
We need to be warm. We need to be entertaining. We need to be educational, inform people of the sites that we’re showing and we need to answer those questions live. It is a perfect platform for tour guides.
“All right, all right, now calm down whippersnapper. Now, why should I go in the Periscoping parts of my tour? It’s not like I’m going to get paid for Periscoping. It sounds like this is all free!” Hey! Fair question mustache man, but we’re going to open our minds just a little bit further.
Very quickly, here are six ways that I believe you can use Periscope and live broadcasting to grow your tour business and drive more sales:
(1) Give a taste of your tour live.
Everyone loves a good tease and there’s no better way to get people aching to come on your tour and by live streaming some incredible parts of your experience or your tour.
If you do this with YouTube videos already, then you kind to know what I’m talking about, but take it to the next level with Periscope and making it interactive and live.
If this group of potential customers grows to love your personality and your presentation style, then you’re going to be the go-to tour guide when they come and visit your area.
(2) Periscoping will humanize your brand.
Periscoping lets you connect with customers in a personal way.
People who are interested in your part of the world or maybe just found you online and want to come on one of your experiences will suddenly have a way to connect with you from anywhere on the globe.
You can showcase your wonderful engaging personality or highlight the talent of your team by doing small interviews with your guide showcasing their talents.
(3) Show behind-the-scenes to build trust.
Beside showing what goes on around your office, you could also use periscope for behind-the-scenes look at your company.
Let people know what you’re doing on a day-to-day basis. Show the first moments of your tour. Maybe introduce people to a chef who cooks your tour’s gourmet lunches.
Could you show someone how you research and design a new tour? All of this strengthens customer’s trust in your brand.
(4) Tutorials and teaching.
Teaching someone something of value for free is a certified way to position yourself as an expert in your industry, whether that’s mini lessons on the history of your area or something as simple as a ten-minute video on how to navigate your local subway system.
There is enormous potential to answer your customer’s questions and knock their socks off with amazing value before they even come on your tour.
(5) Live Q and A.
This method of using Periscope does two things: The first is that it lets your customers and clients see you showcase your expertise in a quick immediate way. The second benefit is that you get to see what questions your potential customers are asking.
This is incredible market research for developing new tours, or blog posts, or updating your frequently asked questions page, or even providing insights on how you could better position, and market, and sell your tour.
(6) Announcements and special offers.
People love discounts and giveaways, and they also love it when they’re made to feel special. Reward your Periscope fans with a unique coupon or discount offers that will help you boost sales and push them into action.
In the same way, if you got a big announcement to make i.e. maybe celebrating your hundredth tour or opening up a brand new tour that you’ve never offered before, give your Periscope followers the inside scoop and they’ll love you for it.
Hopefully, this video got you thinking a little bit, but remember that at its core, Periscoping is all about building relationships with people. It humanizes you and your brand, and you can position yourself as an expert in your niche, in your field, or in your part of the world.
But let’s take this one step further because let’s face it, new technology can be kind of scary and overwhelming. That’s why I’m officially announcing a Be a Better Guide Periscope Challenge.
For 30 days, I’m going to do 30 broadcasts and each day, give you a free tour guiding tip, some way to make your tour better, and because hashtags are pretty fun, I came up with a hashtag #stopthebadguides because that’s really what I’m out here to do.
Every day, for 15 minutes, I’ll do a live broadcast on Periscope which if you download the app and follow me, you’ll be able to tune in and see what this Periscoping thing is all about.
And I’ll give you your tour guiding tip, and then I’ll hang around and take some Q and A from people and we can talk about guiding, talk about that tip, or I can also share some of my experiences with Periscoping and how it’s going.
Hopefully, I’ve got you a little bit interested in Periscope and the whole idea of this challenge is that something that we could do together. You can download the app and we can play around with it a little bit. I’ll figure out how to broadcast and you can see what it’s all about.
As a special insider tip, if you are going to download Periscope for your phone or your tablet, I want you to also follow this user @SaveRome and I’ll put it up on screen in just a moment.
This is the hugely popular account of Darius Arya and he does daily live broadcasts from ancient Rome and he goes around to the various sites.
I’ve been following him now for about two or three weeks and you should follow him too because he is doing exactly what I think you should be doing or what you could be doing with your tour, your part of world to showcase your talent.
Now, if you’re interested in joining me on this challenge, I’ll pop it up on screen. There’re three simple steps that you need to do: Firstly, you need to download the Periscope app onto your phone either from the App Store on iPhone or from Google Play.
Allow Periscope to send you notifications as you’re setting up the app, just so that you’ll see how the app actually works and you can go back and change the notification settings anytime as you like. Number two, you’ve got to create an account.
You can easily use your company’s Twitter account, your personal Twitter account, or just use a cellphone number if you don’t bother with Twitter, but I highly recommend linking in a Twitter account because there are ton of benefits that I’ll share with you later.
Thirdly, you’re going to want to navigate the app until you can search for users to follow and then you’re going to search for @BeaBetterGuide, that’s me and you’ll want to add me as someone you’re following. Then search for @SaveRome and follow Darius as well.
Now, whenever either of us is live, Periscope will send you a notification and you can join in if you like. If you can’t joint live, don’t worry. You still have 24 hours to view the replay at your own convenience.
I hope you’ll join me on this Be a Better Guide Periscope Challenge, and every day tune in live and I’ll give you a free tour guiding tip to make your tours better than ever. Two, you’ll get to know me a little bit better, and three, together, we’re going to figure out what this Periscope thing is all about.
Thank you so much for being here and tune in tomorrow for our first live Periscope broadcast. Goodbye!
