Travel photos a core component of Trover's community of travelers, as the so-called "trovers" roam the world and share their findings. The company calls this a "community-driven visual guide serving travelers and local culture enthusiasts," and they've now made it simple for travel content creators to drop widgets of relevant photos into their websites and blogs.
The widgets allow anyone to capture the visual essence of a place, and use photos that highlight a specific part of a story.
The widgets are available in three types: Profile, Location and List.
Users can select a specific profile, destination or Trover list, and then customize the size and photo quality before copying the code to paste on their individual sites.
The company sees this is a legal way to support content with high-quality travel photos, which makes sense, although it is limited in that widgets exist separately from content. These photos won't be used as supporting images throughout a place-specific article, for example, but can be an engaging supplement to the content offered on site.
The new widgets are also a clever extension of the brand, as it infuses the brand outwards into the ecosystem.
Much like Facebook's like button, opening up the platform for others to use is a means to the end of increased adoption and user awareness. Ideally for the company, travel bloggers will embrace this widgets and begin using Trover to take and share photos from their travels.
By siphoning off some of the traction from Instagram - where it's not immediately possible to do this sort of user, place or list-specific widget - Trover can establish itself more firmly as a community of travel-minded photographers and enthusiasts.
Trover says as much in their release:
With hundreds of thousands of places and images already posted, Trover’s growing community is popular among travel, food and localista bloggers. Trover has distinguished itself by offering a more place-centric platform to share travel stories and local gems compared to Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, as well as a more visual experience than TripAdvisor and Yelp.
The new widgets make it easy for bloggers and websites to easily publish Trover images and experiences right on their websites to help inform and more deeply engage their readers through the power pictures and storytelling.
Trover has been working on extending the brand into the hands of more consumers by forging partnerships with hotel digital marketing platform buuteeq, where they created user-generated travel experiences, and with Bing's Travel division, where they powered custom apps for Bing Travel.
The buuteeq integration means that hotels will be able to include Trover images on-site to offer a more multimedia overview of the location, says Forest Key, CEO of buuteeq:
The Trover community is inspiring, and their photos offer hotel guests a visual gallery of activities and entertainment options in proximity to a hotel. With Trover widgets, hotels can add authentic, on-the-ground content that really highlights the best of an area to prospective guests visiting buuteeq powered hotel websites.
Here's one example from Maui Coast Hotel:
The applications extend beyond hotels to any hospitality business that wants to share nearby attractions in a visually engaging way - time will tell if this savvy move by Trover to move beyond their website pays off by becoming the visual backbone of the travel web.