VisitScotland has discovered that some key areas in the capital’s Old Town feature many times over on their social media channels.
They have found that with 22,609 likes, shares, retweets and comments the Grassmarket, The Vennel and White Horse Close just off Canongate are very popular with people accessing the tourism organisation’s Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.
White Horse Close, Edinburgh pic.twitter.com/31SwLHgKH5
— Lady o’ the Hill (@IreneHutchison) October 22, 2016
Overall, posts about Edinburgh and the Lothians across all VisitScotland media channels led to more than 716,400 likes, shares, retweets and comments between April and September 2016.
But it was White Horse Close which got the most attention out of the posts about Edinburgh. This is a picturesque collection of buildings at the foot of the Canongate with 18,850 likes, shares and comments on Facebook.
The close takes its name from an inn which used to stand at its north end. The White Horse Inn on the Canongate closed its doors in the late 1700s, but in its day it was one of the best known coaching inns in Edinburgh. One historian has described it as “…a Hollywood dream of the seventeenth century”.
VisitScotland’s social media channels have some of the largest followings and engagement of any other destination marketing organisation globally. They have 229,000 followers on Twitter and all of the channels provide inspirational images and information about Scotland to inspire people worldwide to visit the country every year.
With more than 2.3 billion people around the world (30% of the total population) using social networking sites, VisitScotland has a dedicated social media team to ensure destination information about every region of Scotland is represented across different channels to different audiences.
The Douglas Stewart Monument on Calton Hill – it might be a famous shot of #Edinburgh but it never gets old ❤ 📷 FB/Jonathan Cruickshank pic.twitter.com/nlXVZ9KjbR
— VisitScotland (@VisitScotland) October 29, 2016
The majority of images posted on VisitScotland channels are provided by visitors to and lovers of Scotland, with user-generated content of great importance to the national tourism organisation.
The top post overall for the summer was a group of images posted on Facebook of the beaches on the Isle of Harris basking in the sunshine, inspiring more than 310,000 shares, likes and comments.
VisitScotland launched its first ever global campaign – the Spirit of Scotland – in February 2016, with a large emphasis on creating a social movement to help promote the country to the world. The #ScotSpirit social campaign has been VisitScotland’s most successful social media campaign to date with nearly 200,000 uses of the hashtag across all platforms (average 1000 per day) and more than 63 million views of the Spirit of Scotland advert and mini documentaries.
Manuela Calchini, Regional Director of VisitScotland said:
“The way that visitors access information about Scotland has changed dramatically over the past five years and our ambition is to reach more people than ever before with inspirational and exciting information about Scotland. We regard our social network followers very much as a community and we enjoy engaging with both our regular contributors as much as those who communicate with us for the first time.
“We’re delighted that Edinburgh’s Old Town has topped the list of social media engagement and we hope that many more people will share their own treasured stories and images of the city with us, so we can continue inspiring visitors for many years to come.”
The statistics outlined above were counted between 1 April – 14 September 2016. Figures refer to VisitScotland Facebook, Twitter and Instagram only.
Founding Editor of The Edinburgh Reporter.
Edinburgh-born multimedia journalist and iPhoneographer.
