Twitter To Your Hotel's Advantage

Following up on my post yesterday singing the praises of Twitter’s potential (and promoting my own Twitter effort, twitter.com/askirby), I came upon this article on iMediaConnection.com, a marketing trade site. 

The article is a helpful five-point introductory guide on using Twitter to market your business. In short, author Steve Mudler advises marketers to:

1. Listen and learn by using Twitter’s keyword search function to gather grassroots intelligence about what real people are thinking about your brand and industry;

2. Publish valuable news and information, basically pithy press release summaries and possibly links to the full release;

3. Distribute promotions, making special offers available to your Twitter followers to keep them engaged;

4. Create a personality for your brand by giving it a fun, non-sterile voice;

5. Foster conversation with followers, using Twitter not merely as a means of info distribution but as a way to create consumer interaction with your brand.

Points 2 and 3 are pretty obvious, and their likelihood of success is greatly boosted by employing points 4 and 5. But it’s point 1 where Twitter can really stand out from the social media crowd.

A simple keyword search for "hotel" returns Tweets from dozens of people asking for hotel recommendations for a particular city or event. Literally, there’s such a request every five or 10 minutes. Sales and marketing people: bookmark that keyword search and go to it daily, responding to the Twitterers as appropriate with discount offers. Talk about targeted marketing!