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Section 2: Starting a Rural Accommodation
2.2. Marketing
2.2.9. Twitter

Ideas for How to Use Twitter for Marketing & PR

  1.  Engage yourself as a manager of an Accommodation in a social media. Social media is a great way to have a conversation with your market and make and mange connections with prospects, customers, bloggers and other influencers. The disadvantage is that writing a blog or answering lots of messages cost a lot of time. However, Twitter is limited to 140 characters per update, so it is all about short thoughts and comments. If you can send a text message, you can use Twitter from anywhere in the world as a marketing and PR tool. Twitter is actually perfect for an accommodation manager who is a lot of time on the road, meeting people who might have interesting opinions on your accommodation.
  2. Keep in touch with bloggers/media. It is really easy to follow someone on Twitter (see below). And you'll be surprised how often they decide to follow you as well.
  3. Announce specials, deals or sales. You can use Twitter to announce specials events or reduced prices of your accommodation instantly to a large audience.
  4.  Live updates on events or conferences. If you organize a special event for your accommodation or a tourism activity in your region you can use Twitter to announce last minute changes and cool things that are happening
  5. Promote blog articles, webinars, interesting news and more. It is really easy to post a link to something in Twitter. A good idea is to post articles on other websites that are relevant to your accommodation, like a customer success story or other PR coverage.

Using Twitter for Marketing & PR - A Step-by-Step Guide

  1. Sign-up and post a profile. Visit Twitter and click on the "Get Started - Join" button in the middle.
  2. Write some updates. The beauty of Twitter is that the 140 character limit is the great equalizer .Post a link to a news article you liked with a one line comment, mention an interesting thought you had, or tell everyone what you are cooking for dinner. Just write something.
  3. Make friends. Making friends on Twitter is pretty easy. Just surf around the web on your favorite blogs, people's Facebook profiles etc, and when you see a Twitter box that tells you what they are doing click on it. That will bring you to their profile and then you just click on the "Follow" button on the top left and you are now following them. Most of the time they will then follow you back, and the audience for your 140 character insights will have grown by one person. You can get started by following me: Mike Volpe on Twitter. You can also click on the people that other people are following to find more people to follow.
  4. Be aware how to post URLs. Twitter is based on 140 character updates. If you have a really long URL, that doesn't leave much room for Most people on Twitter use www.TinyURL.com to take a long URL and make it short. Give it a shot if you have a long URL that you want to market on Twitter.
  5. Monitor conversations about your accommodation. Even if you don't join Twitter yourself you can monitor what people are saying about any person, company or brand. This is quite useful from a marketing and PR standpoint. Twitter has a search engine that lets you do just this. For instance, here is a list of everyone who is talking about HubSpot on Twitter. You can subscribe to these searches by RSS to keep yourself updated. Another tip is that you can "follow" all the people you find talking about your company (just click on their username to go to their profile). If they are talking about your company, they would probably be pretty happy that someone from the company wants to follow them.
 

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