In every city, there is more than meets the eye. Beyond the famous landmarks and tourist-heavy attractions lie tucked-away bookstores, cozy alley cafes, photogenic murals, and street performers who draw small but devoted crowds. These are the neighborhood gems that give cities their soul. While traditional travel guides might skim over them, today’s connected explorers are using platforms like Social Strudel to share their discoveries. These off-the-radar spots are not just enhancing tourism but are also redefining how cities showcase their unique identities.
City tourism boards are now tapping into the authenticity and reach of social creators to unveil their hidden treasures. With the help of Social Strudel, visitors and creators collaborate seamlessly to spotlight these local gems through engaging and snackable content across the most influential platforms: Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube Shorts, LinkedIn, and more.
A New Wave in City Tourism: From Guidebooks to Guided Feeds
Forget static brochures and star-rated checklists. Travelers today crave experiences that feel personal and unscripted. That’s where the Neighborhood Gems Explorer campaign comes in. Through this initiative, creators and visitors are incentivized to find the lesser-known must-sees and share their journeys through featured content.
This new approach thrives on social impact and visual storytelling. A creator documents their transit journey through a quirky train station mural. A duo spots a tiny record shop and tags it in their story with geolocation info. Another captures the buttery flake of a pastry from a local bakery that you can’t even find on Yelp. These moments are hyperlocal and yet globally engaging, bringing personality-packed places into the tourism spotlight.
Example Activities That Spark Immersive Exploration
- Hidden Spot Photo: Creators find, snap, and tag locations with high visual appeal. Think wall art, unique architecture, or offbeat sculptures. These photos often go viral on platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, sparking organic interest in the area.
- Transit Tip: Creators guide audiences through alternative or scenic routes to reach a destination. They demonstrate not only how to get there but also what to see along the way. These posts shine on TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
- Local Café Tag: From discovering a vintage coffee haunt to uncovering the city’s best cortado, creators provide taste-tested insights for foodies near and far. These spotlight stories are effective on Instagram Reels, Facebook Stories, and Twitter threads.
- Itinerary Carousel: Using carousel posts in Instagram and LinkedIn, creators compile a day’s worth of microadventures. Each stop is visually represented and linked, perfect for swipe-through engagement.
- Map Review: An interactive map where creators pin content along their exploratory journey. These are embedded via Google Maps screenshots in blog posts and paired with story highlights, making the content evergreen and repostable.
What makes these activities resonate is their authenticity. No corporate script. Just pure experience told by engaged visitors and creators who are passionate about discovery.
What Is Social Strudel and Why It Matters for City Tourism Campaigns
Social Strudel is a content collaboration and tracking platform that unites brands and creators on shared storytelling missions. Cities and tourism boards harness it to manage local creator campaigns with ease and scale.
Here’s how it works: The tourism board defines key themes (like hidden gems or neighborhood eats), and then partners with local creators through Social Strudel. The platform simplifies tracking posts, gathering insights, and measuring ROI across multiple social platforms. Best of all, it helps distribute rewards like experience vouchers or exclusive gear to creators who complete activities.
Social Strudel currently supports integrations with:
- TikTok
- YouTube
- Twitter/X
- Twitch
- Snapchat
- WordPress
This broad support ensures that no matter where your travelers hang out online, you can meet them with captivating, city-driven content.
Here’s a Typical Journey of a Creator in a Neighborhood Gems Campaign
- Receive Campaign Brief: The city tourism board outlines the initiative and key areas to explore: hidden parks, alternative shopping streets, up-and-coming food alleys, and notable history-rich sites.
- Plan and Explore: The creator builds a mix of spontaneous and guided visits using local insights and public transit tips. They check off suggested points of interest and stumble into undiscovered ones too.
- Create Content: Short vertical videos, carousel photo sets, map reviews, and quick live sessions are all produced on-the-go. Creators log completed activities on Social Strudel in real time.
- Track and Reward: Using Social Strudel’s centralized dashboard, both the tourism board and the creator can track performance, engagement metrics, and rewards eligibility. For example, creators might unlock future campaign invites or tourism board merchandise for completing 10 unique gem posts.
Social Strudel makes it simple to turbocharge UGC discovery through gamified exploration. This transforms a casual walk or café run into compelling, documented tourism marketing that can scale across multiple creator accounts and social feeds.
Why Creators Love Neighborhood Gems Campaigns
Neighborhood gem scouting matches the creative intuition of lifestyle and travel influencers. It gives them meaningful content ideas and the freedom to explore hyperlocal angles. Plus, it fills their profiles with unique, lifestyle-focused content that stands out from the typical travel influencer mold.
Creators also appreciate the clarity of assignment. Thanks to Social Strudel’s mobile-friendly briefings and integrations, they can upload across multiple platforms without duplicating work. Tagging a park bench mural on Instagram, filming a walkthrough to a local market on TikTok, and sharing a map with notes on LinkedIn is now a single, unified workflow.
Tourism Boards: The Brand Benefits Behind the Scenes
City tourism organizations no longer have to guess which campaigns are working or which creators are hitting the mark. With built-in engagement analytics, ROI dashboards, and multi-platform reach stats, Social Strudel translates creativity into numbers that matter.
Brands can easily schedule campaigns seasonally and provide tiered rewards. Want to push winter tourism? Send creators on a hot cocoa tour. Need to boost weekday transit? Incentivize exploring stations with hidden art. Reward levels like badges, free experiences, or future collaboration guarantees encourage high-quality output.
Plus, the platform ensures every piece of content is usage-rights cleared in advance. That gives city tourism boards a rich pool of assets for ad retargeting, newsletters, and even digital kiosks.
Double-Sided Discovery: Visitors As Everyday Creators
You don’t need a massive following to be part of this movement. Social Strudel lets everyday visitors participate by uploading exploratory posts while visiting a new city or their own neighborhood.
These micro-influencers contribute authentic, fresh perspectives. Their friends see them discovering hidden gems and want to try the same cafe or secret garden too. Done at scale, this kind of engagement generates a massive grassroots marketing engine for cities.
From FOMO to Footfall: Turning Social Moments into Real-World Visits
“I saw this street on TikTok” is one of the most common phrases sparked by successful local creator campaigns. Neighborhood Gems turns these casual content scrolls into weekend plans. It’s the perfect funnel from awareness to action.
With Social Strudel, campaigns like these are no longer sporadic or pieced together manually. Cities can now run multiple creator cohorts, segment neighborhood missions, and layer campaign themes throughout the year. They can even run creator leaderboards to spark friendly competition between influencers who unlock the most gems.
In essence, Social Strudel makes exploring a city an interactive treasure hunt. Every mural spotted, pastry reviewed, and alley explored feeds the city’s digital identity and encourages future tourism.
Join the Movement with Social Strudel
Ready to help tourists and creators rediscover your city’s charm? Whether you’re a city official looking to launch a creators campaign or an influencer ready for your next adventure, Social Strudel is your platform for collaboration, visibility, and results.
Brands: Looking to expand your ambassador program? Book a demo call to discover and collaborate with talented neighborhood explorers.
Creators: Ready to become a destination storyteller? Sign up here to start your journey with city tourism boards around the globe.
