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The iconic ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign is a magnet for selfies.
The iconic ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign is a magnet for tourists bent on taking selfies. Photograph: Marc Dozier/Corbis
The iconic ‘Welcome to Las Vegas’ sign is a magnet for tourists bent on taking selfies. Photograph: Marc Dozier/Corbis

Selfie city USA: Las Vegas taps into social media to sell itself as tourist hotspot

This article is more than 8 years old

With the desert resort destination one of the most popular sites for Twitter posts it’s little wonder marketers chasing the tourist dollar are slaves to the algorithm

They’re the perfect marriage of new and older tech users. Aaron Dean’s 49, born at the back-end of the Baby Boom. Katie Dean’s, 32, a seemingly more tech-savvy millennial. So there they were on the Las Vegas Strip one recent evening, standing in front of the Bellagio fountains, newlyweds taking selfies to be instantly posted on her Facebook page.

They were at one of the two most popular spots on the Strip for posting photographs to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The other top spot: the High Roller Ferris Wheel behind Harrah’s Las Vegas. She wore a lacy, white wedding gown; he was dressed in a stylish, dark tuxedo. Their two young daughters stood nearby, holding small bouquets.

The couple from upstate New York determined from all of the Las Vegas and Vegas hashtags that she saw on Twitter that this was the place for them to exchange their vows and post what invariably will be one of their most memorable photos as a couple. They also determined from her Twitter search where to stay and eat, as well as which shows to see.

“It’s done. It’s posted,” she said, as her right thumb confidently completed that familiar downward motion on her smartphone. “This will be my first post of the wedding – the selfie.”

Katie and Aaron at the Bellagio fountains. Photograph: Aaron and Katie Dean

With more than 40 million people expected to visit the Mojave desert vacation city this year, Las Vegas is one of the most popular sites for Twitter posts. Last year, the city recorded 30 million “impressions” or “mentions” on Twitter. By comparison, London generated 68 million; Paris produced 59 million, and the Walt Disney Co-dominated resort city of Orlando, Florida, saw 12.6 million mentions.

Such media platforms as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have done wonders for the travel industry because they’re live, conversational, highly visual platforms that “give you that first-person view of what it would be like to be in a place like Vegas”, notes Twitter’s industry director, Chris Riedy, who heads the San Francisco-based company’s social media team.

But the platforms have also created a more challenging landscape for the operators of vacation destinations. Conversations are now two ways between marketers and their customers, who possess much more information than in the past about pricing, the multitude of available entertainment and dining options, and the quality of service.

The Bellagio fountains are one of the most popular sites in Las Vegas for social media posts. Photograph: Alamy

“Today’s consumers are much more involved in the purchases they’re making,” adds Phil Auerbach, senior vice-president of marketing for Caesars Entertainment, which owns and operates the Caesars Palace and Harrah’s Entertainment brands. “The ability to dictate who you want to speak with is almost heady; the flip side is that consumers are exposed to a lot more clutter.”

The Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority, or LVCVA – the client that paid for the well-known What Happens Here, Stays Here campaign – recently conducted a social media campaign to drive tourism to Las Vegas from England, the city’s top source of overseas visitors, producing about 400,000 visitors last year. Its primary international markets are Canada and Mexico, each of which borders the United States. Dubbed Visit a Place Where Your Accent is an Aphrodisiac, the campaign encouraged British residents to go into small video booths where they had the opportunity to say, “What Happens Here, Stays Here.” The possessor of the “sexiest voice”, as determined by an LVCVA panel, received an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas.

Another campaign saw LVCVA representatives place small, plastic versions of the iconic “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign in locations around London. The campaign and hints to the signs’ locations were publicized on Twitter, with winners of the scavenger hunt receiving free Vegas vacations. The results from both campaigns: lots of social media chatter in England, further boosting Las Vegas’s algorithmic ranking on Google, Yahoo and other major search engines.

Of course, the What Happens Here, Stays Here credo came under serious challenge in 2012 when photos of a naked Prince Harry appeared on Twitter. Wary Las Vegas visitors wondered whether that popular tag line, produced in the aftermath of a significant post-9/11 travel decline to the Strip, still held true. After all, if the Prince’s bum was viewed by millions, couldn’t yours potentially experience the same fate? The result, a new campaign in the social media age: Know The Code. The unstated message was clear: Tweet, Instagram, Periscope and Facebook all you wish – but do it within limits.

“It’s a dynamic that we’ve been concerned about,” said Caroline Coyle, the LVCVA’s vice-president of brand strategy. “It is a phenomenon to be marketing Las Vegas, but we’re very cognizant of the brand and what it means to the city.”

The not-too-distant future is expected to find Las Vegas visitors triggering marketing messages to their smartphones and social media platforms as they walk past shops, restaurants, hotels and showrooms, providing resort operators and their guests with more information – a win-win for both seeking business and purchasing power but a likely concern for civil libertarians.

“It’s so hard to see where the rate of innovation will take us,” Twitter’s Riedy says of his company, “but the goal is to connect every person on the planet.”

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