Social media: the spark that
drives people to your website

I want to start this one by saying something that is genuinely true about Irish tourism businesses.

An awful lot of them are brilliant at social media.

The Instagram feeds. The Facebook pages with the local stuff on them that nobody else would bother posting. The videos that somehow catch the actual feeling of the place, the light on the water, the dog on the boat, the child roaring laughing. There is real creativity going into this across the whole industry, often by somebody doing it at eleven at night after a fourteen-hour day.

So this is not a chapter about doing more of it.

It is a chapter about one question that hardly anybody asks.

Where does all that interest actually go?

Picture it. Somebody is scrolling. They stop at your video. They watch it twice, which is the highest compliment the internet has to offer. They feel that little pull. I want to do that. I want to be there.

So they tap through to your profile. They tap the link.

And they land on a website that does not match what they just saw. It is slow. It is awkward. It looks like it belongs to a different business in a different decade.

And the excitement your content created just evaporates.

You have lost them. Not because what you do is not worth doing. Because the road from the post to the booking had a hole in it.

Social media gets people excited.

Your website is where that excitement turns into a booking.

Those two things have to work together. And in a lot of businesses, they are operating as though they belong to different companies entirely. The social is alive and full of personality. The website has not been touched since it went live.

So let me be specific about what working together actually means.

Every post worth making should point somewhere. A link in the story. A clear line in the caption telling people what to do next. And the link in your bio should go to the page about the specific thing they just watched, not to a home page that asks them to start the search all over again.

Because think about where that person is. They have already done nearly all the deciding. They are interested. They want more of what they just saw. Your only job in that moment is to give it to them without making them work.

And the page they land on has to match the energy of the thing that caught their eye. This matters far more than people realise. If your Instagram is gorgeous and your website looks tired, that gap creates doubt. The person is already half-asking themselves whether this is as good as it looks, and a dated website hands them their answer.

Consistency the whole way through, from the first glimpse on a phone to the confirmation email, is what turns followers into customers. Followers are not customers. They are people who liked the look of you. The website is where that becomes money.

Now, a word about platforms, because this is where I see the most time being burned for the least return.

You do not need to be on all of them. You need to be on the ones where your visitors actually are, and you need to do those properly. For most tourism businesses in this country, that is Instagram and Facebook. If your thing is visual and energetic and you are chasing a younger crowd, TikTok is worth a look. Pinterest genuinely works for certain kinds of experience, particularly anything to do with weddings or food or beautiful rooms. LinkedIn, for most of you, is a waste of an evening.

And consistency beats volume every time. Three good posts a week, each one pointing somewhere sensible, will outperform posting every single day out of a sense of obligation. Nobody was ever converted by frequency.

Now let me describe the moment I think about when I think about why any of this matters.

It is ten o'clock at night.

Somebody is lying on the couch with the television on and not being watched. They are scrolling with one hand. And your video comes up.

Maybe it is the early light on the water before anybody else is out. Maybe it is a fire going and rain on the window. Whatever it is, it lands on them. They feel something small and real.

They tap your profile. They tap your link.

And what happens in the next fifteen seconds decides everything.

Because that person is not in a research mood. They are in a feeling mood, at ten o'clock at night, and that feeling has a very short life on it. If your website receives them well, answers the question in their head, and makes it easy to say yes, you have a booking before the television takes them back.

If it does not, the feeling passes. And it does not come back tomorrow.

That is the standard to hold your website to. Not whether it looks well on a big screen in your office. Whether it works at ten o'clock at night, on a phone, for somebody who is already half-sold.

So what can you do this week? Three jobs.

The first one. Open your own Instagram bio right now and tap your own link. Where does it bring you? Does that page match the quality of your feed? If somebody came through from your best post of the year and landed there, would they stay? That gap, between your feed and your website, is where bookings are quietly going missing.

The second. Look back at your last ten posts. How many of them had a clear next step in them? A link, an invitation, anything at all telling somebody what to do if they want this. If most of them are lovely pictures going nowhere, then you are creating desire and giving it nowhere to land.

And the third. If you are keeping up profiles on more than two or three platforms, be honest with yourself about whether any of them are getting the attention they deserve. Depth beats breadth here, the same as everywhere else. Drop one and do the others properly.

And here is what I want to leave you with.

Your first hello might well happen on Instagram at ten o'clock at night, with the television on, on somebody's phone.

And the journey from that moment to a confirmed booking should feel like one continuous thing.

One voice. One standard. One experience, the whole way through.