Through the use of social media, travel platforms like Tastemakers Africa, Everyday Africa, Hip Africa, Visiter L’Afrique and others are giving African travel and tourism a fresh and youthful injection by reimagining the possibilities of African travel for Africans, the African diaspora, and international tourists keen to do something other than seeing the “Big Five” on a game reserve truck or buying rugs in Morocco.

At the USC Center on Public Diplomacy (CPD) we research and analyze the ways organizations use social media and digital tools. In our efforts and collaborations, we’ve identified some top tactics that can benefit any organization. [...] How can you sustain your expanded network and leverage social media to maximum benefit in building a stronger and more engaged community?

Abubakar had been feeling frustrated that her home region is best known for its ties to Boko Haram. So in 2015, she decided to do something about it. She started taking pictures of the daily life that she says local and international media neglect as they focus on bomb blasts, suicide attacks, death and destruction — and the fallout from Boko Haram's violence.

Wouldn’t it be great if your government owned the English name of your country on Twitter? You could proudly @mention your country or support your national team with a tweet. Today all English-language country names have been registered on Twitter; however, only 23 governments and state tourism boards have secured their English-language country name on Twitter, up from only nine, four years ago.

In February of last year, Islamic State militants stormed the Mosul Museum in Iraq with drills and sledgehammers in hand. [...] Fourteen months later and 5,800 miles away, that lion was resurrected for an evening in a seventh-floor gallery at the Museum of Art and Design in New York. It wasn’t the only destroyed artifact from the Mosul Museum on display