I am in the tourist industry marketing vacation homes for a small number of home owners in Cairns. We are up against some very large listing sites who try to dominate that crucial first page on the search engines. We manage to hold our own, just, and social media is a big part of that because, as locals, we can provide better content and content is becoming so important for SEO.

Regarding nuance when using social media to market to different countries. I think you should just be yourself. Social Media is about people communicating with people. It is not about business communicating with people. Marketing is the spin off of people talking to each other about their experiences, likes and dislikes, what they value and so on.

Thank you for the suggestion Robin. It is hard to find anyone to do anything for nothing in Oz - labour is very expensive here. Some people are outsourcing to the Philippines for help at $2-3 an hour to run their social media, write articles etc. I can see the sense in that for some businesses selling a commodity but I am not sure about it for us.

My business is holiday homes and my daily battle is to be seen in the search engine results pages. There is only one page which counts - Google page one. In Australia there is a very large listing site in this space which dominates like Homeaway does in the US. It is a major media company with huge firepower compared to a minnow like us. Will the web be taken over by large companies?

My biggest problem is time - just not enough of it to run our website, keep the Social media thing going and run our blog. I spend so much time just learning new stuff but there is never enough time to implement all the cool things I learn. Sound familiar?

Just joined SM. I live in North Queensland and work in tourism - marketing holiday homes.