Travel and Tourism Social Media Tips for Small Businesses

If you are a small restaurant, hotelier or attraction in the tourism industry, it may be overwhelming to jump into the social media game. I recently presented a step-by-step roadmap on how to get your social media program off the ground at the South Dakota Governor’s Conference on Tourism, and wanted to share those tips here.

So what is social media and how does it relate to travel planning? Well, it’s many of the things you already do to promote your business or attraction: you talk, you relate, you share, you collaborate, you advise and you comment. Social media is simply word of mouth, gone digital. People already believe what others are saying about your business. Your job is to get people talking and build a network of brand evangelists in the online space.  Here’s how:

Social Media Travel Tip #1: In a digital sense, tell people who you are and where to find you. Maps are at the core of many online applications; therefore, sharing your basic contact information is critical.

• Customers are searching for you on Google – make sure they can find you. Visit www.Google.com/LocalBusinessCenter to add or check accuracy of your local business listing (this gets you on Google Maps as well). Be sure that your listing includes your physical address, phone number and hours of operation. Take your listing one step further by adding photos, videos or coupons. All of this is FREE.
• TripAdvisor is the most-visited digital travel advisor. Make sure you exist by searching at http://www.tripadvisor.com/UserReview. If not, add yourself by clicking on the “Tell us more about it” link. Then, encourage your customers to add reviews of your business/service.

Social Media Travel Tip #2: Monitoring should be the cornerstone of your social media plan. Track your brand and know who’s talking about you online through blogs, reviews, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

• Visit www.Google.com/Alerts and you’ll find an easy web form to create your Google Alerts. Tell Google what terms you’d like to monitor (your business name, for sure), how often you’d like to receive the alert listing and what e-mail address to deliver the information to. Again, FREE.
• www.Addictomatic.com is an awesome tool to aggregate all social media activity about your company or industry. Type in your business to see what you find!
• There are many other free social media monitoring tools available, including www.Technorati.com/search, www.Search.Twitter.com, www.Tweetdeck.com, www.Facebook.com live feeds and more.

Social Media Travel Tip #3: Get people talking. Encourage your customers to post reviews on TripAdvisor or other social media review sites.

• A great success story of how The Hotel Giraffe, The Library Hotel, The Casablanca Hotel, and The Hotel Elysee gained the highly sought-after top five ranks among all New York City hotels on TripAdvisor: http://www.ftnnews.com/content/view/8345/26/

Social Media Travel Tip #4: Join Facebook. It’s a must – There are more than 350 million active users and today, Facebook hit a new milestone of 100 million mobile users. 50% of these active users log on to Facebook every day. Some things to keep in mind:

• Create your personal account. Facebook accounts are for people, not businesses, so the first thing you need to do is set up your personal account. Next, set up a fan page for your business. Under the facebook logo in the upper left corner, click on “Ads and Pages”, then click “Create Page”.
• Invite your Facebook friends to become fans and encourage them to invite their friends. This is how something “goes viral”.
• Name your fan page something that people would search for. Do not abbreviate. For example, if you are the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Bureau, you would not want to name your page LV CVB, rather something people would actually enter into the search field – Las Vegas, Nevada. This will make it easy for people to find you.
• On your fan page, develop engaging content including posts, photos and videos.
• Be active and responsive, but not annoying. Offer special values to your fans. Remember that you are representing your business, but have fun!

Social Media Travel Tip #5: Focus on mobile. People will continue to use their mobile phones for travel planning, including flights, lodging, dining and activities; therefore, think about the mobile applications for your industry segment:

• Hotels – Lodging.mobi, Travelta.mobi – these applications are changing every day, search for lodging options in your town from a mobile device and if you don’t show up, work with these providers on your options.
• Dining – Urbanspoon or Yelp are two leading mobile restaurant finders. Also, consider restaurant reservation sites like OpenTable.
• People will search for travel options from the medium that’s most convenient for them, so if they’re searching from their mobile device and you’re not there it’s a missed opportunity.

The key to success: Don’t be pushy. Engage and interact, but don’t sell to your network and don’t market to your network. Just build relationships with your customers and the rest will take care of itself. Let people get to know your employees, share behind-the-scenes secrets, share fun pictures in an effort to let people be a part of your world.