How Turkey Home Grew Its Facebook Presence by 3 Million Followers Last Year

Among global destinations worldwide travelers see popping up on their Facebook feeds, few have established an online presence as large as Turkey.

The country’s Turkey Home brand has grown its social media presence to nearly 6 million followers over the past 20 months across all accounts. Facebook alone makes up for 4.4 million of that number, which has risen from around 835,000 in January of 2015. The tourism board won Skift’s 2015 Skiftie award for Best Branded Facebook Page.

The strategy behind their success? Targeting and content.

“Our strategy on Facebook is built around the notion of visibility and appeal on a platform where hundreds of posts flash by users’ newsfeeds every day,” says İrfan Önal, Head of Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism-Director General for Promotion.

“Our posts are created so that our target audience and of course our existing fan base stop and view our posts as they navigate their timelines, ideally like and share it with their networks. To do this, we produce original content with provocative visuals and short yet compelling stories at the captions, that can be rapidly consumed and appreciated.”

The social content created by Turkey Home is largely based on awe-inspiring visuals, like their “Turquoise Coast” drone video co-created with Matador Network (3,745,431 views, 32,154 likes, 17,484 shares and 1,900 comments on Facebook), but the brand really strives to go beyond its touristic assets, embracing Turkey’s distinct cultural values and social attributes while remaining accessible to the global audience.

To do this, the Turkey Home consistently experiments and tweaks its hashtags, mixing in insider lingo and well-timed humor to spark a social conversation with thousands of its followers daily.

They’ll use #RiddleMeThis to educate about local habits and idioms, while #DidYouKnow quizzes viewers on facts about Turkish attractions. Generic hashtags like #LazySaturday or #HappyHolidays — coupled with an aspirational image — are used with the intention to be shared globally. Seasonal trends are emphasized as well, utilizing #StillSummerInTurkey in the autumn to drive tourism after the peak season. It even plays to the Internet’s love of cats, reposting cat photos taken by users in Turkey with the tag #Caturday.

“We are happy to see that our presence as Turkey Home over all social media channels is very powerful. Our community is growing very fast, as well as its interactivity,” says Önal.

“The biggest challenge in digital social channels is the fact that your engagement rates do not usually rise proportionally to the size of your audience. But, we can say that the engagement Turkey Home creates among its followers is higher than its counterparts in many cases.”

For 2016, Turkey Home plans to continue driving engagement over Facebook using the “full potential of the digital universe to reach individual and global actors with the warmest, friendliest and most accessible dialogue possible.”

Average Engagement on a Turkey Home Facebook Post:

Reach: 367,768
Likes: 20,882
Comments: 369
Shares: 1,949
(According to the average of last 4 months)

Check out more of TurkeyHome’s Facebook content here. This content was created in partnership with The Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey.