Travel Technology

You have heard all about Twitter, you know what a tweet is, but as a travel company where do you start?

Businesses are finding it harder and harder to have their websites found on the Internet. With rising Cost-Per-Click (CPC) rates and AD Word costs constantly on the rise, who can blame them? The Travel Industry is intensely competitive, and in order to compete with the giants in the AD Words game you have to spend an arm and a leg.

Social media marketing has given small businesses a chance to compete and also continue what they have always been good at (socializing and maintaining relationships). Twitter is just one of many tools that are available to help with this, but with its ease of use and large share of the market, it makes sense to start connecting and interacting with potential customers here.

What is it?

Twitter has been described as “micro-blogging”, which basically translates into you writing a 140 post updating your contacts about something you find interesting. These posts can include links to other sites, pictures that you just took, even links to short video clips. Companies use it to reinforce their brand, get feedback, advertise, share news and also have a dialogue with existing/new customers. If you are familiar with text messaging on a cell phone, or instant messaging then you are familiar with the format. The main difference is that instead of you communicating with an individual at a time, you now have the potential to communicate with a much wider audience.

Who should start?

According to Richard Earls* “Twitter will appeal to those travel agents most comfortable with developing a casual marketing persona. But to Twitter well, it’s important to take a very concerted examination of your branding, the development of your online persona and the content you develop to post.”

How do I get started?

Tom Humbarger has a great getting started list*:

• Go to twitter.com and sign-up. Pick a Twitter name that matches your company name or alternatively a name that includes your company name such as @companyteam
• Build up a level of tweets so other users will see you as credible and relevant – the minimum number of tweets that you should accumulate before you start promoting your account is somewhere in the 50 to 100 range  (most users will ignore you if you have few tweets or haven’t been tweeting for very long)
• Fill out your profile completely including a URL as most people will not follow anyone with an incomplete profile
• Create a customized Twitter homepage (that matches your corporate brand as much as possible) to provide additional information about your company and products

Getting your message out

• Try to tweet 5 to 8 times per day, and you should space them out throughout the day if possible
• Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message – the others should be tweets about related topics that provide value to your followers or show a more human side of your company; people will stop paying attention to you if you use Twitter exclusively for self-promotion
• Most of your tweets should contain a link to a website, blog post, article, etc. – these  are the types of tweets will establish your Twitter account as being a source of great content and worthy of being followed back
• Use HootSuite’s to schedule your tweets and to track your tweet clickthrus and their Hootlet app to easily tweet the URLs of content at the source – Hootsuite also lets you include multiple users on the same account which can help to spread out the Twitter workload

Following people

• Use one or more of the Twitter directories (WeFollow or Twellow) to locate potential users to follow based on their interests and geography
• Follow anyone who mentions your company or keywords that important for your business
• Periodically do a Twitter search on your company name or click on @yourname from right panel to see who is re-tweeting you or mentioning your name
• @reply people to thank people or to just reach out to them
• RT or re-tweet posts that you think are worthy – generally these people will notice and start following you
• You don’t want to grow your Twitter following too quickly – steady growth is better and a goal of growing 100 to 200 per month is a good start for most businesses

I know the basics, now how do I make MONEY!!

This has to be part of a larger strategy, you will not make money buy tweeting “Please book all of your travel with us, we are really good! REALLY!!”

You have to identify your specialty. The Travel Industry is massive, and if you don’t focus on your specialty then you have little hope of being found online. There are so many different niches in the travel industry that you need to spend energy identifying your ideal customer as well as the type of travel that they are most interested in booking. This will allow you to focus on what your end objective is. Do you want more views/bookings on your websites? More phone calls? More additions to your emailing list? These questions are fundamentally important to understand before you start developing your revenue generating strategy with Twitter.

Once you have a customer in mind, a consistent branding message and know your end objective you need to find a way to give value to your targeted customer. This is where your creative juices need to start percolating.

Some ideas could include:

• Trivia questions with the answers on your website. This would be an opportunity to get them on a mailing list.
• Hot deals of the day updates – you could post one hot deal every day that links to your website. You could then track traffic coming from Twitter.
• Twitter coupons – Picture a “$500 off a Caribbean cruise for the next 5 people to tweet @XYZ Agency is the best!” tweet – This would drive existing followers to book as well as gain additional followers on Twitter. Win Win!

There are so many different things you can do with Twitter to drive traffic and get action, this is only scratching the surface.

Additional Resources

For those that are still getting started with Twitter, here is a good getting started resource, (http://bit.ly/j1Bw2) and here is a video that explains Twitter in a very simple manner: http://bit.ly/11XCTM

This is a list of travel companies already on Twitter: http://bit.ly/DdvY.

Tweetdeck is a great, free tool for helping you organize your Twitter experience.

Inspired from a post by Tom Humbarger: (http://tomhumbarger.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/best-practices-for-corporate-twittering/)

And a post by Richard Earls: (http://www.travelresearchonline.com/blog/index.php/2009/04/the-travel-agents-guide-to-social-marketing-a-twitter-overview/)