Social Media is becoming one of the major tools for company's public relations.
According to the social media workshop hosted by San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau, twitter is a perfect tool for destination marketing. Social media allows people to share experience and story, get and provide travel advice, etc.
Here are some interesting statistics on travelers' behavior in terms of social media:
- 20% use mobile/ PDA to look for travel info
- 23% use google earth to gather travel info
- 26.7% use local CVB site
- 19% use social media
If your target is around the people in their 20's to 40's, social media would be a good to tool to reach because:
- 57% of those who are in the age of 25-34 use social media
- 30% of those who are in the age of 35-44 use social media
Addition to twitter, facebook and google earth, there are a couple of things you can utilize:
In flickr, there are 61,000 San Diego photos, and 31,000 comic con photos. You might want to check out "GuessWhereSD" on flickr.
Don't be overscripted. People sense that.
Here is another statistics: 10% of the twitter users are responsible for 90% of the traffic. Intersting.
There are some other social medias such as myspace, but the number of users is decreasing and the users are mainly teenagers. (If your target is that generation, myspace can be your tool.)
How often tweet? If you are a destination, 4-6 times a day, if you are a hotel, maybe twice a day. You might want to "retweet", meaning referring to some other's tweet.
If there are some upsides, there are some downsides too:
- You can't measure how much does it generate the revenue
- Social media can be a place where people criticize/ complain about your product/ service
Here is interesting article 4 reasons to shut up on twitter. Please take five minutes to read through.
If you are interested in overseas market, you might want to utilize the local social media. It is not still common that non-individuals use social media as a marketing tool, you might want to research beforehand if it is effective to use.
Labels: Tips, Tourism/ Marketing