build community – Intrepid Travel’s vice president of global communications says the company restructured its social media strategy to move from high-volume posting to real participation—adding a dedicated social team, encouraging customer sharing, creating a community manager
If Intrepid Travel’s social media accounts disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice? The question is asked every year inside the company—less as a critique of the team’s work and more as a test of whether the accounts actually add value for the audience.
The answers, the company argues, come down to three forms of value that work on social: inspiration, education, and a genuine sense of community. When the world feels off course, a brand should offer leadership. When it feels too heavy, it should offer levity.
For Intrepid Travel, that value is measured through what the audience takes away: whether people feel inspired to travel with a more local lens, learn about a new experience, dish, or destination, and learn how to travel responsibly.
Last year, the company added a fourth pillar. The question became simpler, and more demanding: did the audience feel part of a community?
The problem wasn’t intention—it was structure.
Social teams, Intrepid says, are often built to produce a high volume of owned content. Social becomes a distribution channel for multiple departments and a pipeline for projects and product launches. In that setup, brands tend to optimize for output rather than participation.
To change that, Intrepid Travel says it didn’t just tweak messaging. It rethought how its social strategy is run, and it made four specific changes.
The first shift was internal: create a dedicated social content team.
Previously, the social media team handled everything—creative work, caption writing, community moderation, and customer service. Now, the social team is solely focused on production and posting across owned channels. Intrepid says the objective for these roles is to work within its core content pillars and maintain strong social output 365 days of the year. ensuring content creates value for the audience while driving business outcomes.
The second change was about who should be speaking.
Instead of focusing only on content created by Intrepid, the company turned attention to content about Intrepid. Intrepid Travel describes itself as one of the largest adventure travel companies in the world. running 1. 000 trips in over 100 countries—from safaris in East Africa. to food tours in Italy and treks in Patagonia.
The trips, it says, are deeply shareable. But it found that travellers weren’t tagging Intrepid on social. and the company wasn’t connecting the dots between customers and its social media efforts. More than 95% of people on trips weren’t tagging Intrepid on their posts. despite the company saying it knows almost all travellers share their experiences.
Closing that gap became part of the strategy.
That brings the third change: create a community manager role.
Intrepid says it hired a two-person community team under its head of social and community. The team focuses on two primary community groups: customers and internal creators. The social media manager leads content created by the company, while the community manager leads content about Intrepid.
Intrepid says asking customers to tag the brand made a difference. and that the community manager ramped up social moderation and built a program to incentivize travellers to share their experiences. Each month, Intrepid gives away a trip anywhere in the world to one random traveller who tags the company.
Intrepid says this year it is on track to have over 10,000 posts by customers about Intrepid.
It also connects those posts to business outcomes. Intrepid says word-of-mouth drives at least 20 percent of its direct customer acquisition. The logic is straightforward: Intrepid customers know other Intrepid customers. and when they share their experiences. it becomes low-cost marketing aimed at highly qualified customers. The company adds that consumers trust content by people more than traditional advertising—so social and community working together can produce stronger business results.
The final change is a mindset shift that governs how the brand shows up online.
“Community is something you foster, not force,” Intrepid says. Creating a community team, it adds, brought the company closer to customers by ensuring every comment is responded to. Intrepid says it not only likes customers’ posts and messages—it also engages with them to create a sense of belonging.
One example is a Facebook group created by a traveller who lives in Tasmania, Australia, but has travelled all over the world with Intrepid. That group has grown to over 8,000 travellers.
The company describes the space as fundamentally different from a brand-run channel: it isn’t run by Intrepid. It is run by Intrepid travellers for Intrepid travellers. Intrepid says it has developed a strong relationship with the group’s founders and administrators. It also points to a private Facebook group where it offers trip giveaways and early access to trip releases.
Intrepid says the groups deliver two things at once: “tons of actionable insights” and a genuine space for connection on customers’ terms, not the company’s.
Social media, Intrepid concludes, is noisy and crowded, and increasingly hard both to attract an audience and to keep it. Attention can be difficult to win, but the company argues that belonging is harder.
Still, it measures what it can—and it says it is starting to place more emphasis on posts about Intrepid, not only posts by Intrepid. Those posts, it says, provide proof, word-of-mouth, and help grow the brand through the customers it worked hard to acquire.
Social and community, Intrepid says, are powerful drivers of growth when they work together. And while the company believes people would miss its social channels if they disappeared tomorrow, it also believes customers would continue the conversation without it.
To Mikey Sadowski—vice president of global communications at Intrepid Travel—that is the real benchmark: not just whether social is successful, but whether community is.
Intrepid Travel social media strategy community building word-of-mouth customer acquisition community manager social content team Facebook group customer engagement