Summer is the year’s peak travel season, which makes it absolutely critical for Expedia, the world’s largest and leading online travel agency.

Speaking to travelers, most see online travel sites as interchangeable, with loyalty dependent on who is offering the best deal. There’s a bit of truth to this, especially during a competitive season. So, with tens of millions of travelers getting ready to book their vacations and visits home to family, Expedia needed to differentiate themselves from the competition as more than a utility or ‘just another ‘travel site.

Our opportunity came from Expedia’s newly launched presence on Instagram. By growing Expedia’s Instagram following and connecting directly with travelers, we could establish deeper, emotional connections with the Expedia brand – which would be essential when it came time for travelers to book their trips.

Travel is a major theme of Throw Back Thursday (#TBT), but no travel brand was taking advantage of it – despite the fact that it is the 4th most popular hashtag on Instagram, with over 342 million posts. That’s why aligning this trend with Expedia worked so well during the competitive summer travel season. With #ThrowMeBack, Expedia didn’t just use a social data insight to build on a trend, it tapped into the emotion of how travel makes people feel—it’s not about how you get from A to B, it’s the experience and memories you create.

The results :

- Received over 20,000 submissions (Source: Instagram/Twitter/Expedia Internal Reporting)

- The campaign generated over 5 million impressions and 300K social engagements (likes, comments, shares) with 92% positive sentiment (Source: Sysomos MAP and Topsy)

- We DOUBLED Expedia’s Instagram following (Source: Instagram/Expedia Internal Reporting)

- Over the course of summer 2014, Expedia’s share of flight bookings grew 17%, while its share of hotel bookings grew 19% and the brand’s share of travel package bookings grew by a whopping 55%. (Source: Millward Brown Digital).

Ultimately, thanks to a simple data-driven idea, Expedia engaged travelers in a new way and added something special to the summer travel season.

In 1998, Expedia essentially invented the online travel category by turning the computer around and giving control of people’s trips directly to travelers. Since then, more people have booked their trips on Expedia than any other site. So, as the world’s first and leading online travel agency, Expedia is always innovating new ways to help travelers find and book meaningful trips – at great prices – that allow them to get the most out of their world.

But to stand out during the peak summer travel season and grow Expedia’s Instagram followers, Expedia didn’t need any complicated algorithms or data analysis – just one simple, underutilized social-data truth:

With more than 342 million posts on Instagram alone (and the 4th most popular hashtag on the platform), Throw Back Thursday is one of the most popular user-generated memes on the internet. Every Thursday, people around the world post pictures that remind them of fond memories, tagging them with the hashtag #TBT.

Travel is a huge part of Throw Back Thursday, with many people posting nostalgic photos of favorite travel destinations and experiences, reminiscing about trips with the hope of returning. However even with such a relevant connection to travel, no travel brand was taking advantage of Throw Back Thursday (#TBT) to establish deeper brand connections. That’s what made it such a great opportunity for Expedia.

Our idea: use Throw Back Thursday to literally throw travelers back to recreate their favorite travel memories.

Every Thursday, we asked Instagram and Twitter users to upload a #TBT photo and tag it with #throwmeback and @expedia for a chance to be sent back to recreate their photo. Each week of the summer we would select our favorite photo and then fly the people in the photo to the location it was taken.

Expedia’s summer campaign capitalized on the Throw Back Thursday (#TBT) trend and got people to connect with the brand in a new way by inviting the world to submit their favorite photos for a chance to actually be thrown back to the photo’s location and recreate the memory.

By piggybacking on the underutilized popularity of Throw Back Thursday (#TBT), we opened the Expedia brand up to millions of people. To get the most out of the meme, we focused communication around Thursdays, enlisting popular travel Instagrammers to get the word out and ask their followers to play along.

Each Thursday for eight weeks, more and more travelers sent in their pics hoping to recreate their favorite travel memories, with our submission rate more or less doubling from week to week. We supplemented word-of-mouth buzz around the campaign with promoted Tweets targeted at active users who were likely to be future Expedia followers, specifically people who traveled, followed influential travelers, or talked about traveling frequently.

Since we picked just one photo to be recreated per week, social listening and analytics were indispensable when it came to culling down the tens of thousands of submissions. We used native analytics tools as well social listening services like Sysomos MAP and Websta to help us find the most interesting photos, filtering by visual quality, social traction (likes, “regrams”) and most importantly whether recreating the photo would help us tell a compelling, spreadable brand story.

We selected the best submissions and flew the subjects back to recreate their photo. We kept the conversation going with GIFs, user-generated Instagram videos, and a film that showed one of our many winners’ journeys to be thrown back.