#lovecapetown evolves into travel research tool

According to BrandsEye, there were 3 732 unique #lovecaptown conversations* across the social media platforms over the period.

Cape Town Tourism CEO, Enver Duminy, notes that social media monitoring is a new field, still open to debate, but explains that; "Whilst we are looking to diagnostic tools to determine the ROI, we are more interested in the longevity of the project. Since we first started to use and market the hashtag #lovecapetown last year, it has become something widely used by locals and visitors.

It's being used spontaneously to express thoughts and feelings about the destination, as well to share discoveries and favourites along the journey. It's is in no way owned by Cape Town Tourism and we are committed to encouraging its organic growth beyond this recent hosting by curating the #lovecapetown mentions into an online portal www.capetown.travel/lovecapetown, so that would-be visitors and locals can refer to it as a user-generated tool for planning and discovering the city through the eyes of others."

The bloggers hosted in 2013, represented broader themes too, unlocking the destination through food and design as well as travel in order to reach a broader and more diverse audience from the UK, Brazil and USA.

Cape Town Tourism partnered with Nox Rentals to accommodate the bloggers and each blogger had a full daily itinerary that included experiences of township life, Woodstock street art, creativity, pop up dining and many of the more traditional attractions that define the destination. Bloggers tweeted, posted to Instagram and Facebook, and wrote blogs about their stay. Some blogs are still to appear.

* A unique conversation in the social media space is a conversation initiated between a single user and the brand or hashtag, not counting interactions with this single Tweet - RT's (retweets) or replies. I.e If there are 2000 unique conversations, this means that there were 2000 Tweets between individual users and the brand or hashtag, which would have converted to numerous RT's and replies.