Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Twitter and Travel Industry

Note: Content borrowed from and references made to Project Wander as well as Dead Mouse Sandwich

Many operators are asking me about Twitter, what is it? Should I be tweeting?

And the answer is not straight forward.

Twitter is the ability to talk to all your followers with one "text message". Messages in twitter can only be 124 characters. Frankly there's not much you can do on the twitter page itself, twitter requires you install Tweet Deck or some other third party "tweet organizer".

In a nutshell:

It will take some creativity to come up with new and useful 124 character tweets

You have to gain followers (and keep their trust)

And you need to install Tweet Deck

Twitter is not a place where you can just tweet out your specials one right after the other. All your followers will drop you. Applying the dead mouse sandwich principle, you need to wrap tweets about your business with tweets that are interesting and meaningful or retweets.

Twitter is working best in a customer service capacity to some degree for companies like Comcast, or Dell. Celebrities are having fun with Twitter.

It's definitely a time consuming venture.

For our market in Atlantic Canada, your best online bet is still your website, and perhaps a facebook fan page. But definitely your website. It's still your best online impression and close to 50% of Atlantic Canadian travel operations are making a terrible online impression.


Twitter, I wouldn't get my feather ruffled over it.

5 comments:

  1. Hey Beth, Thanks for the reference!
    Graham

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  2. I'm trying to get Twitter but Facebook takes up most of my time.

    comcast customer service

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  3. hmm I think that they are two totally different things. Twitter is really for talking to really tech savy consumers and industry people and facebook is for friends and family. At least thats how I use it.

    From a selling/marketing perspective, Facebook is a better medium for attracting consumers. I have heard others say facebook is for people I know, Twitter is for people I WANT to know. I tend to agree.

    Hope to see you on twitter soon? If you do, add me! @grayum_ian

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  4. Hi
    Sorry I didn't read your comments earlier, frankly I'm shocked to even have comments ! I've learned a couple of lessons of my own here - one check my comments more often, two some folks really ARE maintaining their brand and checking their internet presence, and three set up my blog to email me my comments :)

    Take Care,
    Beth

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  5. I dont really have too much experience with blogger, but keeping up with comments would probably be easier with a wordpress blog? Better looking, but costs more and takes more effort. How do you find it (blogger)?

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