Effective Twitter Marketing Strategies Travel Agents Can Use Right Now To Generate More Business

Today is a time when customers can make their own travel arrangements online and travel agents now need to ramp up their marketing strategies if they wish to succeed. All this time, travel agents have mainly been focusing on increasing the interest among people on the idea of travel or to help them pick an ideal destination to relax and enjoy. However, with increasing competition from large OTAs, they now need to concentrate on building their brand and establishing meaningful connections. This network of good personal connections is a must in order to grow their business in the coming months. To achieve their business objectives, they will need to apply a variety of effective offline as well as online marketing strategies.

To help you get these strategies right, we would like to share a few marketing ideas that will help grow your travel agency business.

To be successful and achieve their marketing goals in the digital age, travel agents need to have an active social media presence. It also requires committing to a minimum amount of time each day to curate, comment and share travel information with relevant groups having common interest so as to help in expanding the network.

We suggest that in order to expand the reach and connecting with more potential new customers, travel agents must focus on the sites that have large membership numbers, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube or Twitter.

Out of these, Twitter may seem the hardest to understand and execute but once you get the hang of it, it can deliver wonderful results.

Travel professionals can register themselves as authorities about various topics on Twitter and become go-to sources of information for the customers looking for information on the go. In fact, Twitter can also be used as a news feed for lead generation for their business.

Although many Travel industry insiders and agents have often stated that they would go for a Twitter campaign if it enables them to write tweets longer than 140 characters. However, one cannot underestimate the efficiency of the existing 140 character limit.

Irrespective of the form your Twitter marketing campaign takes, the following tips and ideas can help you set sail in the right direction:

Tip 1: Automating posts/tweets to save time

Automating or scheduling your tweets through various tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer is a great idea to spend the least time on managing your twitter account or other social networking account online.

Also, this ensures that publishing your Social media posts do not take the entire day. If you have not explored these tools, understand that these applications help you manage and organize your Twitter tasks. In fact, you must set a realistic goal of spending just 15 minutes a day to reply, share and schedule your tweets to promote your business.

Tip 2: Creating Twitter lists

Following more and more people on Twitter can make it extremely difficult to managing your twitter feed. And, in case you are going through all the tweets, you shouldn’t be surprised by the overwhelming response. One thing that can be done to simplify this is to create custom lists, that will enable you to see tweets from various other members even if you’re not following them.

Tip 3: Becoming a search expert

The Twitter search box and #Discover tab are tools that can help you find leads and information relevant to your business. You must understand that unless users have private accounts, all tweets posted on Twitter are public and this way can be effective in finding leads through search. You can do this effectively by typing in keywords, phrases or hashtagged (#) words as per your requirement. A combination or variation of phrases like “looking for vacation” or “need help to plan travel” can help you with desired search results.

However, it will not be right to assume people to make purchases directly via twitter and hence, it takes a lot of effort and time to convert leads into customers. So you must keep in mind that it takes a lot of time before anyone online on Twitter would make a purchase. The other side is that it can be of your advantage as you can share your expertise or offer your services on tweets that are based on questions relevant to your business.

Tip 4: Join Twitter chats

Twitter chats might appear like contests with huge responses or participation, but this can be the ideal time to engage with others about a shared interest or topic as it offers a lot of benefits. Always remember that Twitter chats can be of great help in expanding the reach to your audience that can fetch you more followers. An added advantage is that you will surely discover something new about that topic.

Tip 5: Think quality, not quantity

Don’t get hung up on how many people are following you. Instead, find people who are relevant to your target audience and with whom you can engage and get more customers for your business. You need retweets, mentions and replies to your tweets to increase your influence.

Apart from these tips, you must know the following:

What to tweet about – An important thing to have a strong strategy to get people engaged in the twitter conversations

• Trumpet your travel niche with excitement, recommend the ideal travel deals to people seeking an opinion or suppliers in other business sectors; this will hopefully enable them to respond as well.
• Publish links of relevant blog posts, articles or helpful information on your website.
• Besides text based tweets, also use images or videos pertaining to your services as well as the destinations your marketing strategy to inspire people to travel and book from you when they decide to go on a trip.

To help you plan, create a strategy and execute it in the best possible way, here are some best practices for Twitter:

• When writing a tweet, use relevant/trending hashtags to increase the reach of your tweet among your audience. Don’t stuff your tweets with hashtags though as that can turn people off. We recommend using no more than 2-3 hashtags in a tweet.
• While tweeting, leave some space to give the person who is retweeting some space to mention their handle. Hence, avoid using full 140 characters in your tweets, so that when someone retweets you, there is room for their handle.
• Use DM (Direct Message) for one-to-one conversations with your prospects/customers. It is the simplest of all, hence you must do it whenever required.
• If you are posting links, use URL shortening tools such as goo.gl/bit.ly to save characters so that you can embed more information in the same tweet.
• To promote your travel agency offers, make sure your Twitter profile includes a catchy photo, a keyword-rich description about the offer and a link (shortened using the step mentioned above) to the relevant landing page on your website.
• One way to increase traffic is by commenting on current Twitter trends. This works efficiently when you ensure that the hashtag is included to have your tweets post on trending streams.
• You can also Bookmark tweets that you want to save or reshare later by using the Favourite command.

We hope these tips and strategies will be helpful to you in establishing a strong network of your audience and achieve your business objectives through Twitter.