Our guest Paul Anderson spent 15 years in hospitality, left it all behind, and is now helping hosts like YOU grow massive audiences and boost direct bookings — without wasting time posting every single day.
If you've ever felt like you're shouting into the void on Instagram… or wondering why your beautiful posts aren't converting into guests — you do NOT want to miss this. Get ready for some hard truths, easy wins, and insider secrets that will change the way you use Instagram forever.
[00:00:00] Liam: Welcome to the Boostly Podcast. This is the podcast that gives you the tools, the tactics, the training, and most of all the confidence to go out there and get yourselves direct bookings. Today we're welcoming back Paul Anderson. He is the social, uh, hotelier, sorry, social media hotelier, a returning guest from three years ago.
[00:00:17] Liam: We were talking just before we pressed record. I can't believe it has been three years since we've had Paul on. However, in that time, he's gone on to do some amazing things. He is a speaker. On Instagram. He was even in the direct booking summit, which is something, uh, run by Mark Simpson, which was on, uh, recently and worth checking out on YouTube if you have not heard of that.
[00:00:38] Liam: So let's jump in. Welcome along Paul. Thank you for joining me today.
[00:00:41] Paul: Thank you so much for having me back. Liam. Um, I can't believe it. It has been three, three years and I can't believe that you still don't know that I am the social media hotel after.
[00:00:54] Liam: I dunno how I get that, uh, mixed up. I've, uh, I could have practiced it a hundred times, but this is where we hit record. We stick with it. I have
[00:01:02] Paul: to con confess that over the last couple of years I have. Considered a rebrand 'cause the social media is a bit of a mouthful and everything is the social media hotelier.com and all the rest of it.
[00:01:12] Paul: It just, it just goes on and on and on. Particularly 'cause I specialize in Instagram organic marketing. So since I was last on the, on the show, which as you said was what? April, 2022? Mm-hmm. I have closed my guest house in Oxford, England. So that was after 15 years of enjoying being a host. I kind of came to the end of the line personally with that.
[00:01:32] Paul: And now congratulations. Oh, thank you. Thank you. It's been an interesting shift, but maybe we'll talk about that a little bit later. Um, I close it in order to focus my efforts on helping hosts leverage the full power of Instagram to drive traffic to the booking websites and listings. And that's what I do to, um, full time now, which is, which is awesome because I absolutely love teaching.
[00:01:55] Paul: I love helping people. I love seeing people get awesome. Uh, I love seeing people get awesome results and, um, just the ability, I think, or the opportunity to talk shop, um, if anyone's seen any of my content previously. I do talk about this. If I go to the pub with my mates and I start talking about short term rentals and or Instagram, by the time I've been to the Jens and come back, the place is just absolutely clear, so thank you.
[00:02:21] Liam: What would you say is the one thing you want people to remember from this episode?
[00:02:25] Paul: Oh, crikey. I know you and I do tend to go, go on tangents and move forwards and back, but I think if there's one message, um, that I could give to hosts who are looking to, to use content marketing is that there is nothing to fear when posting content.
[00:02:43] Paul: And so I would encourage people to just hit post. Done is always better than perfect, and so. If you are, if you produce some content and it hits the mark and it goes viral for you, brilliant. That's super aim to repeat that performance. Mm-hmm. But if it's rubbish, so what the algorithms will go, this is rubbish.
[00:03:03] Paul: They're not gonna show it to anyone, and so no one will actually know really. So the trick then is to learn from it for for good or for ill, so we can understand why it did, why content did or didn't perform, and then iterate towards the success. Then we standard chance of improving, getting better, driving, more traffic to our, to our websites, to our listings.
[00:03:26] Paul: And so I'd like one message to be just hit.
[00:03:31] Liam: Post, just before we dive into the actionable steps, can you just talk us through the, uh, history, how you moved from hospitality into this coaching space and what, um, that brings along with it as, as some of the experience and, and how you understand what the people listening to this are trying to achieve?
[00:03:49] Paul: It's a, it's a fairly long story, so I'll, I'll try and keep it, um, short if that's okay. Um. The reasons for the move are, are in no small part, your fault, Liam, and certainly Brucely has to shoulder a large proportion of this blame. Um, so somewhere in the, in the maelstrom that was the pandemic, I, uh, along with many other business owners within and outside of hospitality, were, were forced to, or, or had the opportunity to take a step back.
[00:04:17] Paul: And to consider what we were doing, how we were doing it, and why. And it dawned on me that despite having been self-employed for, for decades and living by the adage of work hard and advertise, advertise some more, go back and advertise again, I'd, I pretty much stopped actively marketing my business. You see, when, when I opened the doors to my guest house in Oxford, it was 2008, 2009, and it was, it was way back in the day when I used to receive inquiries via fax.
[00:04:47] Paul: Um, and so as well as the kind of outbound comms and people sending me a fax and I pick up the phone and call 'em and all that type of thing. Marketing at the time was also very, very lumpy. It was tri-fold brochures, business cards, pounding pavement, essentially to get my business into the Oxford Colleges, local hospitals, cafes, and all that.
[00:05:11] Paul: But. Slowly but surely the kind of advent of TripAdvisor and the online travel agencies grew into the B mos that, that we low and that we know and, and perhaps perhaps love or hate today. Mm-hmm. And knowing it, my, my business was. Was running from a marketing perspective, um, simply by virtue of being number one on the number two rated guesthouse in Oxford on TripAdvisor.
[00:05:34] Paul: And that was it. So I'd, I'd stopped designing brochures. I'd stopped my weekly round Robbins jogging to local campuses and hospitals and putting my card up and local supermarkets and such, and I'd actively stopped marketing myself. So I, I opened up Google. And I searched for something like modern low cost marketing and up pop what I now know to be the usual suspects.
[00:05:59] Paul: Facebook, Instagram, uh, Twitter, or X. Still don't really know what Twitter is, but it's good. Um, and in short, just content marketing. So I. I joined a Facebook bootcamp, would you Believe, hosted by Brucely and I saw amazing results. So I registered an account with Instagram and Twitter, but I still really had no idea what I was doing.
[00:06:20] Paul: I was posting pretty pictures, um, but I was getting crickets. Um, and then I discovered captions, so the words that accompany the pretty pictures. So I started to try to use those to encourage people to book with me. And still it was just, just tumbleweeds. So. Despite very slow beginnings in terms of results, Instagram seized my attention.
[00:06:42] Paul: Um, after all, that's what Instagram is designed to do, is to grab people's attention and to hold it. And I lost myself in the mashup of, of its creative breadth and dynam. The best way to explain where this obsession comes from is to tell you that when I finished high school and before I headed to law school, I left with qualifications in four subjects, maths, physics, economics.
[00:07:06] Paul: And art and design. And the thing is, if it wasn't for the art and design, I wouldn't have been half as successful with the others as I was. And the same applied to my efforts on the Instagram. So I was determined to figure out how to use Instagram to push people onto the booking page for my guest house.
[00:07:23] Paul: I'd seen heaps of content saying it could be done. So many Instagram gurus talking about posting every day, mixing content with videos, 20 stories a week. And so I tried it. Um, I'm part of a local independent business group and they ran a kind of 30 posts and 30 days challenge. Um, and I just dove into that and I saw an improvement in results and I decided at the end of that challenge just to keep going.
[00:07:48] Paul: Um, another 30 days of devoting all my time, essentially to creating content went by and, and I was officially obsessed.
[00:07:56] Liam: I guess one of the questions that I've got and, and host listening to this is, what is working now that perhaps wasn't working before? You know, what are some of the big picture kind of algorithm changes or the things that we need to be aware to generate that engagement?
[00:08:09] Paul: Wow. Three years of Instagram change. Okay. Um, a lot has changed. Um. Instagram is a, a constantly shifting platform. Um, and importantly how and why people consume short form content. So to, uh, TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram is, is always in a state of flux. Mm-hmm. And despite arguing for years and years, um, to Blue in the face that these platforms are not social media platforms, they're advertising agencies, the word social remains uber important.
[00:08:45] Paul: Most recently, the, the statistics strongly suggests that that direct connections between accounts, so direct messages and sharing content are being pushed much harder by Instagram. People are spending more time in the direct messages than they are on the home feeds, and this is why we're seeing the rise of services like many chap.
[00:09:04] Paul: And it's absolutely then the case that. Posting frequently and regularly is not a marketing strategy anymore. So on the on the connections front, the last few years I've seen a wealth of features added to direct messages, particularly video messaging, broadcast channels. Being able now to forward schedule direct messages.
[00:09:26] Paul: Um, and so it feels like there's, there's a new movement. Um, there's a new type of story sticker apparently released almost every month. And following the, the success of meta integrating two of its platforms, Facebook and WhatsApp. They're now making efforts to do the same with Instagram and WhatsApp to pull all three platforms as such into one ecosystem.
[00:09:50] Paul: Um, so we can now add WhatsApp details to the Contact us button for business accounts. There's now a WhatsApp sticker which allows people one click access to send a host a message from an Instagram story they get. You can basically have the ho have the guest come straight into the host's direct message portal if they use WhatsApp for business.
[00:10:13] Paul: Wrap that all up. Then in the, in the advent of ai, and this has completely changed the landscape for smaller creators, so in the right hands, AI can now generate mountains of content. Mm-hmm. In fact, I think recent estimates are now over 50%. I think it's 54% of content on the internet is now AI generated.
[00:10:33] Paul: But I always caution my students against relying on it too heavily. Yes, we can use it to generate ideas and to plan content. But increasingly I see people copying and pasting what it produces and just thinking, well, job done. And it, it saddens me because people who are looking for shortcuts rather than to make the workflows more efficient, which is what I use AI for, they, they forget the immutable fundamentals that underpin all successful marketing.
[00:11:04] Paul: And the, the content just becomes part of the, the noise and the jazz that's being spewed out there. I would strongly suggest that to have any chance of creating any form of impact, we have to create signal that cuts through all of the noise in the jazz by understanding who will we talking to. Because Instagram is a one-to-one platform, not a one to many platform.
[00:11:28] Paul: If we think about how people consume content, it's one person. On the other end of one of these, a lot of people will feel like they're standing on a stage and, and broadcasting.
[00:11:38] Liam: I wanna leave some time for you to, um, talk about obviously the bootcamp, which is, is really cool. Can you give us, um, a story of how somebody's used Instagram to increase their direct bookings?
[00:11:51] Liam: And then can you link that as to how, uh, feel free to plug your, your bootcamp after that as well.
[00:11:57] Paul: Cool. Good. It's free. So if I have an opportunity to give loads of more people, loads more value, then that's brilliant. Um. Let me think. Who can I choose so many to choose from? I'm gonna choose Dina Haria. I think you know who Dina is.
[00:12:10] Paul: Um, Dina Haria runs Amari Vela, uh, which is in Catalonia in Greece. And she originally was a one-on-one student of mine. Um, and she took the principles of perfect potential guest. Content pillars and a manageable, sustainable kind of cadence and calendar. And she, she landed 15,000 pounds worth of bookings for one property in three months with just three posts per week.
[00:12:37] Paul: Amazing. Right? I mean, she's absolutely a star student, which is why I, I do talk about Dina a lot because she's brilliant. Um, and then about a year after we'd finished the one-on-one coaching, um, I. She came back to me and she went, that was awesome, Paul. It's been a year. What do I do now? And my response was, well, we, we need to, we need to improve.
[00:13:00] Paul: We improve your workflow so you can produce more content in the same amount of time, or just take that extra time, have a cup of tea, and we improved the quality of your content. So Dina then joins the INSTABOOK training program. And we analyzed the performance of her content from 2024. Nadina is a super, super diligent student, um, has a really strong work ethic, so she'd religiously followed my advice and recorded the performance of the 120 or so pieces of content that she'd published in 2024, and she'd recorded it consistently 24 hours after it was published.
[00:13:37] Paul: So we copy and pasted that spreadsheet somewhere else, and when we sorted it with. The top reach at the top of the spreadsheet and then we did it again and did the most link clicks at the top of the spreadsheet. She's now in the process of rescheduling the top performing 20, 25% from both categories, carbon copies of the originals, and the next 20, 25% that performed well, but not top of the pops.
[00:14:03] Paul: As such, she's looking at where she can improve it, making little tweaks to it, and the bottom 25. She's trying to analyze why it didn't perform well by comparing it to the content that we know performed. Or she's just going, I'm not doing that again. I'm gonna do more of this. And so by regularly reviewing and iterating on the work that gave her that 15,000 pounds in three months, she, she can't help but to keep winning.
[00:14:33] Paul: And I, I'm really excited to see the results she gets from this new wave of effort because. They need to come up with something new, something completely fresh every single time. And I think the best way to illustrate why people need worry about repeating or, or just making small adjustments in their content as they go, is if we picture an account that has a thousand followers and they publish a piece of content and it reaches 500 people, 500 accounts.
[00:15:04] Paul: Pretty strong to be to, to be fair. So strong piece of content. Let's then assume that searchability, keywording, all that good stuff, the the discoverability piece was really effective. And of those 500, 250 were non followers. Brand awareness. What that means though, by implication is of those thousand followers, only 250 of those followers even know that content exists.
[00:15:31] Paul: Still another 750 followers who've never seen that piece of content. So you can post it again. And if, if one of them comes back and go, oh, you did that three months ago, the chances of them being your perfect potential guest, I'll slim you. None. You go, all right, fine, move on. I've, I've had people do it to, to, to, to, uh, I've had people do it to me several times.
[00:15:54] Paul: Come back. I dunno why you keep repeating content. I'm gonna unfollow you now. Okay. Yeah, this is not an airport. You don't need to announce your departure, just if you don't like it, it's free advice and go somewhere else, you know? Um, and so we can, we can make small adjustments over time. We can make dramatic ones to, to test, and this is where Dina's gonna take it next.
[00:16:15] Paul: By virtue of being able to carbon copy 30, 40 posts, she's now got that extra, extra time either to experiment or, as I said, have a cup of tea.
[00:16:26] Liam: Before we go, Paul, what is a final takeaway? If, if a host is listening to this right now today, what's one thing that they can do to improve either their Instagram or their direct bookings?
[00:16:38] Liam: What would that be? And anything else you'd like to leave our our guests with?
[00:16:42] Paul: I do, I do bang on, and I have banged on about this a lot today, is understand who, who do you like hosting? Who is your perfect potential guest? And that could come from past guests. It could come from saying, well, I'm perfect for groups and families, but the families who stay with me have young children like I do, who just create a godawful mess.
[00:17:12] Paul: And I'd rather have a group of mid thirties people. Okay, so. Who amongst that group is gonna be the one with the credit card making the decision and identify who you, who makes your life easier, and therefore, who can you serve best? Because if we target a perfect potential guest, we can manage your expectations before they even arrive at our doors.
[00:17:35] Paul: And if we manage those expectations, it then becomes remarkably easy to exceed them. And once we exceed those expectations, they're the ones. Who essentially become our, our free sales force. They tell their friends, they tell their relatives, they tell TripAdvisor, they write the reviews, they come back. And the same applies to the way that we market.
[00:17:56] Paul: So if we can attract the people that we are, that we love to host, the ones that we'd be happy, uh, I forget who came up with the phrase like, would you be happy to go for a beer with them? I don't drink beer, but would you be happy to go for a beer with 'em, them. If you target them, then you standard chance of cutting through the content marketing noise, and it's a really noisy space.
[00:18:16] Paul: Really, really noisy space so that if your content talks to the individual and your profile is optimized to grab their attention and go, we are perfect for you and you are perfect for us, and you do that quickly, then we stand a chance of taking people from the top of the funnel through the flywheel of our content.
[00:18:37] Paul: Out through the Link bio and as soon as they hit that link in bio, they are giving us the undivided attention. And attention is absolutely the new oil, the new gold, the new black, doesn't matter what you wanna call it. It's all driven from attention. Grab the attention, hold it, and then redirect it what you want it to go.
[00:18:56] Paul: Well,
[00:18:56] Liam: thank you so much and uh, look forward to having you on again in two, three years time and seeing the journey and the update. Then let's do it sooner than that.
[00:19:03] Paul: Let's
[00:19:04] Liam: do it sooner. Yeah. Yeah, let's, let's do it sooner than that, thanks again. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks for listening.
[00:19:08] Liam: Absolutely. Pleasure.
[00:19:08] Paul: Thank you so much for your time, li. Appreciate you
[00:19:10] Liam: having a blast. Gonna get it on the Boostly podcast. Boostly. Let Bruce Lee 'cause it's so hard and the tea is loosely making up those rhymes. Don't write it, just do it loosely.
