Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages, similar to SMS, 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers."
To follow is a video explaining Twitter in plain English.
Twitter is an absolutely free service and is ranked as the 13th most popular website worldwide by Alexa’s web traffic analysis In February 2009 a Compete.com blog entry ranked Twitter as the third most used social network based on their count of 6 million unique visitors and 55 million monthly visits. With a monthly growth of 1,382 percent, can you afford to ignore this social networking phenomenon any longer?
The ability to communicate in short format, known as a “tweet”, has been crucial to Twitters success. When you post any updates on Twitter you are posting a “tweet” and you can post as often as you like just as long as your “tweets” are not more than 140 characters long. People who read your tweets are following you and when you read other twitters tweets you are following them. The idea of social networking through Twitter is to build a community of followers within your target audience. To achieve this, your target audience needs to be interested in your tweets.
How is Twitter useful for my hotel or resort?
As a Resort Manager, Twitter has many great uses.
- Twitter is a great way of broadcasting information such as new blog posts, specials, events, new attractions and any other information that might be relevant to potential guests. By broadcasting relevant information you will quickly attract a large number of followers. This is also a very powerful way to drive traffic back to your website/landing page.
- Connect directly with potential guests? By using the Twitter search functionality and TweetDeck you can search for people looking for accommodation. Using the reply functionality you can quickly connect directly with these potential guests.
- Monitor what people are saying about your brand. Using Twitter search and TweetDeck monitor tweets that include your brand name. This is a great way of keeping up to date with what past guests have been saying about your business.
- It is a great way of researching and monitoring your competition. By following them on Twitter you will quickly be kept up to date on news, events, specials and potentially a ton of other information that could give you idea’s to market your own property.
- Interested in International groups, event coordinators, boutique travel agents? Twitter search is a great way of strategically targeting key clients. By spending the time to find key clients Twitter is an easy way to connect and build a relationship.
How are you using Twitter in your business?
