By Mark Hodson, editor of 101 Holidays
Should tour operators use Twitter as part of their marketing strategy? I think so – but only if they do it right. Yesterday I spoke on a panel about Twitter at a meeting of the Association of Independent Tour Operators (Aito). I was there in my capacity as chief Tweeter for 101 Holidays and a SEO consultant.
Here, I summarise and expand on the points I made.
• Twitter allows small fry to punch above their weight. It doesn’t matter who you are, or the size of the company behind you, your influence on Twitter is dependent on the quality of your Tweets. If you’re intelligent, interesting and engage with other people, you’ll attract followers. This means Twitter favours individual experts rather than large corporations – a great fit for Aito, whose members include many small specialist tour operators with tremendous destination knowledge.
• Twitter is a social tool – it’s not about forcing heavy-handed marketing messages on your followers. Tread gently, respect other people, engage, have fun.
• A lot of travel writers are on Twitter and they will follow you if you’re interesting – not if you’re churning out press releases. Travel writers tend to work from home and – though this may seem sad – many socialise online. I’ve made friends with a number of travel writers on Twitter, some of whom I’ve yet to meet in real life. Twitter allows travel companies to connect with journalists who might otherwise not even answer their emails.
• Before you launch a Twitter company account, think about your strategy. Do you want to use it to deal with customer relations issues, as Easyjet has done, or do you just want to build rapport with your customers, as Mr & Mrs Smith has done? What you don’t want is to launch an account then leave it dormant. You’re advertising the fact that you’re clueless about social media, and – because you’re not responding to the community – that as a company you’re not listening to your customers. Flybe was guilty of this for a considerable time.
• You can also use Twitter as a listening device, rather than a broadcasting tool. Set up an account in your own name, or use an alias. Don’t add a link to your company website (links from Twitter have no SEO value, anyway). Start following influential travel journalists (you could start with this collection of travel writers and editors), and just eavesdrop on their conversations. What are they chatting about? What information are they looking for? Can you spot an opportunity to step in and offer some useful help?
Also on the panel yesterday was Louise Newton, marketing manager at Somak Holidays. Louise talked eloquently about how she’d successfully used Twitter to engage with high-profile journalists, and by Tweeting about some of the unusual and interesting things her company does, managed to get them mentioned in newspapers such as The Times. It was an entertaining and convincing pitch.
The third panel member was Matt Illston, a director of Mr Zen, an online marketing company. Matt gave some interesting examples of how companies such as Exodus and Gap Adventures have used Twitter, although he concluded by saying: Get the basics right first, such as SEO and web analytics, before you invest time in Twitter.
Interestingly, Aito itself doesn’t have a Twitter account, although there are plans in the pipeline. “When we do it, we want to do it properly and have a proper strategy,” says a spokesman.
Do you have any thoughts about how travel companies can use Twitter? How should Aito use it? Please leave a comment below.
Like this? Email a link or share it with your friends
Tags: Twitter
I thought this was really good advice and a neat summary of the benefits/pitfalls of using twitter in the niche market of travel. I Hope it went down well at AITO!
AITO are already halfway there – they have an excellent PR company who are already proficient/engaging twitterers!
The best advice would be for them to take note of what you have said above and NOT put Ian and his team at Travel PR under any pressure to use twitter to post press release/sales messages.
Instead, the AITO twitter account should be the senior conductor at an AITO “water-cooler” where it, and individual AITO members can gossip about the characters in AITO companies, and what they are getting up to. EG, “Expert Africa’s Chris McIntyre has just returned from Botswana without his underwear, which was eaten by a croc” (I just made that up…. but somehow find it convincing!)
People put the “social” in Social Media, not sales messages.
Mark, I totally agree with you that Twitter will only work for tour operators if they “do it right”. During my time in travel Twitterland, I’ve observed the updates of some travel brands, which can only be described as rather flat and insular. Twitter is a social network, travel brands have to interact, not operate in a self promotional vacuum. No point is setting up a Twitter account just because everyone else is.
I’ve found Twitter very effective for promoting Europe a la Carte, my Europe travel blog. Based on my Twitter experience, I’ve launched TravelBrandTwt to assist travel brands establish and maintain an effective Twitter presence, making Twitter work for them. Clients could be Twitter newbies, travel brands who believe that their current Twitter presence is not effective or brands who need an extra pair of Twitter hands to boost their Twitter presence.
The Somak holidays case study is interesting (I wasn’t at the AITO conference). I will add my own personal experiences so you can see how I think this whole thing works!
Success on social media should be looked at via the lens of reputation and attention. On each tweet you need to think
- am I earning or spending reputation / “followability”
- what level of attention will this tweet require from someone who follows me (i.e. do you always tweet to articles that take 30 mins to read, or do you tweat 10 times a day)
When you overreach attention requirements – or reach a tipping point on reputation / “followability” – then you can be unfollowed (or still followed, just ignored / not engaged with)
EG if you earn “followability” from great tweets can afford to spend it on tweeting offers (if that is your target reader). (IF you have earnt B2C “followability” and the offers are B2C…. )
Take the advantage conference last weekend. Somak Holidays tweeted a succession of out of focus pictures of late night socialising with TTG journalists. That could well have been an unfollow event for a consumer follower.
http://twitpic.com/icq7r
It was an unfollow event for me (but I waited until end of conference). Actually I only started following Somak at the start of the conference when they tweeted that they were doing to tweet the odd thing from the tour operator’s perspective. I wasn’t engaged with their brand enough to survive following once the photo tweets were sent out!
But for TTG journalists, it was a massive “must follow” event. No TTG journalists featured will unfollow Somak now for fear of missing something they are involved with. It was actually very astute from Somak, but came at some cost to other followers (like me).
A tweet can therefore be both great (for one audience) whilst a disaster for others.
I do this too….. I tweet the odd thing that is quite technical (like why the pound sign isn’t in UTF8). Frankly that is pretty boring stuff to a PR / marketing / journalist person…. but just about acceptable if I only do every so often. What it does remind the more technical people following is that I am technology practitioner rather than a blogger.
And I know I have made plenty of mistakes along the twitter road…. in that I have been unfollowed by people I respect on several occasions – and have to work hard to get them back. Its part of the game.
No doubt I will be accused of over analysing things….. that is often the case….. but as the discussion of Somak holidays was brought up I thought it would be interesting.
To me, the big question Somak have to answer is – who is their twittering aimed at?
Is it consumers (from the sound of what Mark wrote in the blog post, nope)?
Is it trade? Maybe
Is it journalists? Sounds most likely
I wonder then if the aim is trade / journalists then this should be made clear to consumers on the Somak holidays profile description.
I *think* if I were advising them I would have two twitter accounts making it easy to point consumers to a consumer safe twitter account kept clear of trade conference stuff, @ conversations with trade journalists etc etc
@alexbainbridge
I use Twitter extensively for my business (a franchise of http://www.explorertravel.co.uk) and for a small operation like mine, its ideal. I’m small enough to interact at a personal level with individuals and other companies plus its also another way to send out news, offers and updates to followers.
It does require some time and effort but the same would be true if you were trying to build a relationship with anyone on or off line.
http://www.twitter.com/explorertravel
Thanks for all the great comments.
@alexbainbridge: I completely agree with your thoughts about “followability”, which can be earned, spent and thrown away. I think anyone on Twitter with a commercial motive should think about that. Surely a subject for a blog post of your own, Alex?!
@alastairmck: great idea about the “watercooler” Twitter feed. And, like you, I really can believe Chris McIntyre might have his pants eaten by a croc (though I don’t necessarily want to picture the scene).
@TravelBrandTwt: Karen, it’s great to see someone with your experience on Twitter being able to persuade companies to use your services. Keep us informed of your progress.
Replying to Alastair – I’m not at all sure if electornic gossiping about the characters in AITO companies is really a way forward, but it would generate some posts.
Your comments were very close on one count – I have recently got far too close to an intetrested croc – in the Lower Zambezi – although I didn’t stick around long enough to find out exactly which part of my anatomy, or clothing, he was interested in.
Perhaps luckily, I wasn’t twittering at the time.
Lol, Chris. I DID say it was a strangely convincing scenario!
I wasn’t thinking of the water cooler conversation really as pure ‘gossip’. Rather as a vehicle to talk about the things companies are up to. So a croc moment might serve as the pointer (shortened url) to a blog post covering a recce visit to a new part of Africa that you are building into a new tour itinerary.
A press release headline (or tweet): “Sunvil launches Romania programme” is just as interesting/dull as the 20 other product launches announced that week.
It becomes much more interesting as a tweet about people: “Noel has just returned from his hols in Romania. He loved it so much, we’re starting a programme there. shorturl”
I think AITO has some amazing personalities in its membership with huge stories to tell, and it would be a shame to waste a Twitter account by not exploiting that.