Social listening tools know brands. They do not know places. For destination work that is the gap that matters most.
The decision: What the campaign should say, who should carry it, and what any of it was worth.
The people on it, and what they say afterwards.
None of these are wrong. They each answer part of the question and then stop.
Built around brand mentions. A destination's visitors mostly talk about the individual businesses inside it, which those tools do not connect to the place.
The number everyone quotes and the weakest predictor of anything. It says nothing about whether the audience is real, local, or interested.
They describe how the client wants to be seen. Visitors are already describing how they see it, in public, in far more detail.
The themes that recur in a destination's reviews are the things visitors themselves think are worth mentioning. Both halves are useful: the praise is your message tested in advance, and the complaints are the thing a campaign cannot outrun.
A campaign for a destination needs an audience that could plausibly visit it. A national account with a large following can be worth less than a much smaller local one, and follower counts hide the difference entirely. Audience quality and location are the parts that decide it.
Reach, earned media value, indicative cost and brand risk can be modelled for a specific number of posts and stories in advance. That converts a negotiation based on rate cards into one based on what the activity is projected to be worth.
How Workbench handles it
Read what visitors to the actual place say, at the level of the individual businesses, and pull the recurring themes.
Audit an account properly before it is booked: audience quality, suspicious follower share, engagement, growth and brand safety.
Model a campaign before committing to it, for the specific number of posts and stories being discussed.
Take the same treatment to a competing destination, so a positioning argument has a comparison behind it.
Every one of these is a standard report in Workbench. You ask in your own words and get the written report back, formatted to forward on without explaining it first.
Is this account worth working with?
One account broken down on audience, engagement, quality and growth signals, including the audience's age, gender, geography and interests.
What is this partnership actually worth?
Modelled reach, engagement, audience quality, media value and risk for a specific campaign of posts and stories, rather than a rate card.
What would a pop-up with this roster deliver?
Scenarios for a booked roster of named influencers: total reach, earned media value, cost and a campaign quality and risk score.
What do visitors already say about this place?
Real customer feedback turned into strengths and recurring pain points, which is the brief for what a campaign can credibly claim.
Sign up free, draw the boundary you actually care about, and ask the first question in a few minutes.
Get started freeAlso written for