Twitter tips for tourist boards

Following on from my post last week about how tourist boards should approach Facebook, it seems only right to move onto that other staple of social media, Twitter.

There are innumerable guides to Twitter etiquette out there, and before you read this, if you’re entirely new to Twitter you’d do well to read one or two. This is not meant as a generic guide to Twitter, but some rules on how to approach it as a tourist board. We’ve worked with a number of tourist board clients developing and implementing strategies for Twitter, including Hungary, New Mexico and Ireland.

First, decide on your strategy

Before you even consider posting your first Tweet, it’s important that you work out why you are Tweeting. So many organisations take the decision to ‘do’ Twitter without any idea why, and it’s always apparent. There are many different kinds of Tweeters out there, people use the site it for many different reasons, and there’s no set function for tourist boards. However these are some of the ways a tourist board can use Twitter:

• Answering queries: a lot of companies use Twitter specifically for customer service. This function isn’t as straight forward for a tourist board, unlike an airline such as easyJet, they don’t have hundreds of people asking them where their luggage is or why they didn’t get an email confirmation for a booking, but people do ask questions. With clever use of Twitter search (if you’re using a Twitter client like Seesmic, Tweetdeck or CoTweet you can save searches) you can spot when people are asking questions about your destination (e.g ‘can anyone recommend a good hotel in xxxx?’), and interject appropriately.
• News: keep all of your followers up to date on the latest news from your destination (like with Facebook, remember not to localise – make it of interest to potential visitors, not the locals).
• Offers: a lot of people follow Twitter accounts in the hope of getting some kind of exclusive deal. If you’re able to send out offers that are exclusive to Twitter, fantastic, but just Tweeting any really good deals works too and might even convert into that social media holy grail – actual bookings, meaning ROI. Be careful not to spam these though, definitely no more than one a day.
• PR: there are loads of journalists on Twitter, and of course the bloggers are on there too. It can be a great way to communicate with them, make sure your destination is top of their mind, plus they’ll often Tweet looking for ideas, a great source for PR opportunities.

You don’t have to decide on one of these, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to do all, as some are mutually exclusive. For instance, most journalists are not on Twitter to provide you with another avenue of sending them your news and offers, so if you’re doing that (or doing it too much) you’ll turn them off and it will be harder to use for PR.

Or, if you’re just answering query after query, you’re providing a helpful service but you’re unlikely to gain that many followers as people don’t want to watch you answering other people’s questions – so a customer service based Twitter is not going to be a great way to distribute your news.

Your geographical market is likely to be important too, particularly if you’re Tweeting offers.

Work out a balanced way of achieving what you want from Twitter. It may be that you end up setting up multiple accounts.

Naming your account

I explained in my Facebook post that you shouldn’t name your page after the name of your official organisation, as people are becoming fans of the destination, not the tourist board employed to promote the destination. Twitter is a bit different here – people should be following you for information, not to show their friends what they are a ‘fan’ of, so they do want to know that this information is from the official tourist board. So making your account name official, like @VermontTourism or @VisitEngland, is a good idea.

However, as it’s ordinarily the PR and/or marketing department operating Twitter, you often see tourist board/DMO/CVB accounts with ‘PR’ or ‘marketing’ in their username. Unless the only purpose of your Twitter account is PR, or discussing your marketing strategy with stakeholders, avoid this as it will turn people off.

Identify some hashtags

First, if you don’t know what a hashtag is, read this guide. Next, identify what’s relevant to you. It may well just be #yourdestination, you may wish to use some popular tags like #tourism or #traveltuesday (a tag a lot of people use to discuss travel, on Tuesdays).

Use Twitter’s information on what’s trending, or whatthetrend.com to see if there’s any trends you can jump on. Try to stay relevant if doing this though, crowbarring in a hashtag for popularity’s sake looks a bit desperate.

You can also look at starting your own hashtags, but I wouldn’t recommend this until you’ve got a decent following. Canadian airline @WestJet have a great example of doing this in #WingletWednesday, but they started the promotion after having a good base of followers. Inventing your own hashtag only for no one else to use it can be a bit embarrassing, like telling a joke to a room full of people without anybody laughing.

It’s not all about numbers

Anyone can find themselves thousands of followers. Just find a list of people who follow back, and follow away. You’ll quickly find yourself drowning in a world of Twitter spam. You can have followers in the thousands, but have a click through rate for links you post of 0.0001%, and find no one is retweeting you.

By all means look for people to follow, but try to keep them relevant. Follow people who Tweet about your destination, or travel in general. There are some great lists of travel Tweeters out there, such as @Matt_Parson‘s Travel Industry on Twitter list which you can add yourself to, and all the user generated lists within Twitter itself (see ‘lists’ on the right under a relevant Tweeter’s bio and stats).

Then just keep Tweeting interesting, relevant content, according to the strategy you’ve settled on. Much better to have 500 followers who are all interested in what you’re Tweeting than 5,000 who only want you for your follow back.

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Some of the rules I mentioned in the Facebook post also apply to Twitter – link from your home page, don’t let your PR or marketing agency do it all, update regularly and as I’ve mentioned, don’t localise.

Are there any other rules for tourist boards on Twitter?

Follow me on Twitter @imckee

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