1. Engage with your customers and could-be customers
Because Twitter messages are short and sweet, customers are often quicker and more likely to type a response than they would be to send an email or make a telephone call – you can see what people are thinking about your messages in real time by monitoring retweets, favourites, responses or questions.
You can also then reply to people quickly and easily so you can get your point across, thank people for their interest and respond to any specific questions – below is a great example of this from the Cullen Bay Hotel.
2. Piggy back on national campaigns and trending topics
As a small property, your marketing budget can’t compete with large commercial or tourism organisations but Twitter is a leveller and you can take advantage of national campaigns or trending topics to join the conversation and put your name out to a much wider audience than you might ordinarily have access to.
A great example of this is #englishwineweek – small, independent vineyards such as eviivo customer Denbies Wine Estate, have been able to take advantage of this national hashtag to be visible to large groups of new could-be customers. They’ve even offered a 25% discount on two of their wines via their Twitter feed! Another example is the use of #letouryorkshire by Yorkshire properties.
3. Build relationships with large, complementary organisations
You might already be a member of your local or national Tourism Association – for example Visit Scotland or Visit Britain – and with Twitter you can build great relationships with these organisations by tagging their accounts within your tweets which might be of interest.
So you might take a great photo- of your local area and tweet about how gorgeous the weather is, ensuring you also tag @VisitScotland. With active accounts such as this, you will often see this content gets retweeted – the key is to make it topical, pretty or useful to a wider audience. With this, your property is suddenly in front of massive numbers of Twitter users both nationally and internationally.
4. Share your great feedback
What do you do if you receive a great review on TripAdvisor? Perhaps respond to the customer to thank them but with Twitter, you can widen your response to a new audience by sharing your reviews with your Twitter followers and make them feel even better about their upcoming booking or make them consider you for the future.
eviivo property The White Horse makes great use of this by sharing news of good reviews and also soliciting extra reviews on TripAdvisor via their Twitter feed too which is a great example of combining social media.
5. Become a source of great content
If you think about what people are looking for, they want to go to the fewest possible places to hear about the most relevant, most interesting content. If you can become one of those places, you’ll encourage people to share your content and keep coming back (as well as make you the place they think of when booking accommodation).
So, how can you do this? Set up lists within Twitter, monitor your favourite sites and share their content, add commentary and added value. Add rich content like photography or videos, tweet about local events and become the best place for people to visit to find out about your town or area. There’s no reason you can’t emulate Twitter feeds like that of @SouthWestUK who retweet stories about the local area – but keep your own comments coming through too!
Happy tweeting everybody!