Some of the best ways your community can boost tourism interest from Twitter, can only be achieved by the regional marketing association leading the way. As a direct benefit, you will enhance your reputation among members when the services you provide make a difference to member businesses.
15 ways your travel association or DMO can use Twitter
Enhance your relationship with your tourism member businesses by generating buzz.
- Make sure you to use Twitter Clients that help you see what’s going on. Twhirl and Tweetdeck are good places to start on your computer. As for iPhone, I’ve been recommending the free Twitterfon. Each can show your twitter stream in friends, @messages and direct messages. So you can forgo the email notification of dm’s and not miss a thing.
- Monitor the Twitterverse: Use a tool like Tweetscan or a search panel to track people who are planning to visit your destination. Monitor regional place names, parks, attractions and nearby travel icon words. Be ready with a helpful follow or information to help these twitter travelers.
- Use Nearby Tweets to track local tweets within a defined geographic boundary.
- If you have multiple staff using Twitter for your CVB, consider using a short hash tag ie: #cvb on each of your tweets. Encourage visitors to your region to use the hash tag and monitor it, in addition to a dedicated address.
- Promote your Twitter ID and/or Hashtag on your Website or Blog and in signature lines for email. Encourage travelers to your region to use it.
- Suggest member services: local attractions, restaurants, accommodations. Provide links to their Web sites and member twitter id’s. Businesses will appreciate the fact that you are sending visitors their way.
- Host Tweetups with your members. Informal gatherings to develop Twitter strategies for your community or DMO.
- Follow your members and people in your community. Keep in touch with direct messages to CVB members in one felled swoop using tool like GroupTweet.
- Recommend members services to local Twitter visitors. Suggestion from @springfieldCVB
- Retweet member tweets, like @Go2HR BC’s Hospitality HR organization did for @OpusHotel.
- Find Twits to hire help with your Internet Marketing projects by posting jobs on Twitter.
- Use a separate Twitter account for research. Follow other regional travel organizations and stay tuned to professional development opportunities. Get help from others using a non-regional branded twitter account.
- Tweet local and Tweet timely. Keep a local focus. My best bet is that Twitter isn’t going to bring visitors from afar. Remember travelers to your region are likely to tune in shortly before their visit or while in your area. Keep a local and timely focus to your tweets. Develop an editorial calendar to your Tweets and tweet local events with different types of info a few weeks prior to events, right up to and including the actual event and followups.
- Post prominent signs in travel centers and throughout your community letting folks know your Twitter ID. and that you are there to help. Develop a schedule to monitor twitter traffic like you would your phone during peak travel season.
- Use your Twitter ID when you comment on blogs. Try it out, when you post a response to this post, consider using your Twitter id as the linking Website.
Is your community innovating and trying out new strategies using Twitter? Contribute your ideas to the mix.
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A few more tips:
- Provide a complete twitter profile (don’t be too vague with the bio)
- Add your twitter name to your email signature, website & e-blasts
- Personalize Direct Messages by using the follower’s name (otherwise they look like spam messages)
- Work with the other CVBs in your state as well as your tweeting hotels, attractions & restaurants (great for retweets)
- Verify and update your http://www.twellow.com profile (256 characters for your bio; optional 2,000 character extended bio; join up to 10 categories; add social links: facebook, flickr)
Thanks Anne.
Those are great suggestions.
Great post, Todd. I specially like 13, creating an editorial calender to start promoting events in time.
I’d like to add tweeting links to videos, blog posts and pics from travelers who just came back from your location. “Testimonials” (or twestimonials is yo’re retweeting the travelers) always work well. You can monitor those in blogsearch engines or Google alerts.
Portland becomes the first city to open a Twisitor Center: http://budurl.com/pdxtw A new way for visitors to get travel information. ~ tweet from @coldinpdx
oh yeah, Todd!! All those tips are very helpful. Our first week with Bay of Fundy on Twitter has been awesome…still getting in the groove but the potential is screaming out to us. So glad we have you to translate all this crazeee stuff for us!
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