Promoting your Travel Business Through Social Media

This is part 2 on my presentation on “How to market your travel website: How to increase backlinks, PageRank and Website Traffic“. I gave this presentation to a group of travel experts a few months back. In part 1 I included a slide show of the presentation to help you understand some of the techniques better. The following deals with the social media part of the presentation.

Visit to Travel Sites Rank High

Even within the highs of the recession, reports have indicated that visits to online travel sites are on the rise. “Visits to travel-related sites showed typical seasonal increases as Americans planned their summer vacations. The Airlines category ranked as the top-gaining category for June, growing 22% to 33.2 million visitors. Also among the top gaining categories were Travel Transactions, Online Travel Agents, and Travel Information” ComScore

Visits to travel sites

Should you Consider a Blog?

UK-based Social Media Portal (SMP), which tracks the global use of social networks, believes that it’s vital for companies to build their brands through blogging. Blogs provide a place for two-way interaction between the organization and consumers, and allow customers to provide valuable feedback on how the brand is doing. Blogs are built using user friendly applications like wordpress and typepad. With the use of blog plugins one can communicate with a variety of social media sites just from a single blog post. For instance, a wordpress blog plugin called “Twitme for WordPress” automatically sends data to your twitter page every time you perform a blog update.

Here are a few of the most widely used blogging platforms or applications

• Wordpress
• Live Journal
• Blogger
• Squidoo
• typepad
• joomla
• drupal

Free Classifieds

Essentially, free classifieds are the old social media. Why you should use free classified sites to market you travel business? Many of them rank very high in google and they generate a lot of traffic. Also, some of them will allow you to add links to your classifieds, thus adding backlinks to your site and naturally increasing your site’s ranking.

Here is a list of free classifieds

• Kijiji.com
• Craiglists.com
• Backpage.com
• inetgiant.com
• travelblog.org
• Thebeat.travel
• dickandfanny.com.au
• Travelbeen.com

Social Media Sites

Success with social media sites all depends on your determination give it your best shot and your realization that all social media sites are not the same. You must use different techniques to attract and retain travel customers on each media platform. Keep in mind that some of these sites have a distinct culture and attract certain demographics.

With determination all things are possible

• Facebook
• Linkin
• Twitter
• Merchant Circle
• Flickr
• Digg
• Squidoo
• Scribd and docstoc
• Video Sites

Travel & Social Media

A recent survey was conducted through which travel agents were ask the question: In which of the following social media platforms
do you participate?

1. Linkedin 58.0%
2. Facebook 44.8%
3. None 28.2%
4. Twitter 15.5%
5. Blogs such as theBeat.travel 12.6%
6. Other 7.5%
7. ACTE Connect 6.3%
8. MySpace 5.2%

7 Tips for Marketing Your Travel Website with Facebook

1. Use it to get listed on the Search engines
2. Create a user friendly Facebook address
3. Setups arcResBookings on your Facebook page
4. Create/participate in Facebook discussions
5. Become a Facebook Fan of related pages
6. Add a Facebook button to your website or email signature
7. Add videos & pics via cellphone

6 Tips for Marketing Your Travel Website with Twitter

1. All about followers so increasing the numbers should be priority
2. Search Twitter for a travel market or travel focus group
3. Use services like http://twitproquo.com/
4. Use TweetMeme on your blog
5. Add your site to Wefollow twitter directory
6. Add twitter links / buttons to websites and email signature

Promoting Your Site with Linkedin

1. It has appeal to professions who want to create a network of like minded people
2. Send network friends updates and messages of specials and events that might interest
3. Stressed executives need a holiday!
4. It’s a web-based form of word-of-mouth marketing – the idea that a person is more likely to buy your product if a trusted source vouches for it

People & Sites to Follow

In every walk of life, those who succeed usually have a mentor or a group of people they follow and admire. Here is a group of people you should follow

Mattcutts.com – works at google on issues such a linking, spam, seo issues
Entrepreneurs-journey.com – build an outstanding membership site business
Problogger.net – one of the most successful bloggers
Johnchow.com – makes over $30 a month blogging
Searchenginewatch.com – daily news on search engine and social media issues

What’s HOT

Searching for the most used travel keywords

Not every body search for the same things. The words you may used to search for travel deals online are not necessarily the same words your friends will use. One person may google “cheap travel deals” while another “discount travel deals”, while still someone else may search “low travel fare”. Before you start posting blog articles and creating social media campaigns, it is vital to  learn what are the top keywords people are using to search online for travel deals. You need to know what are the latest travel trends, what’s hot and what’s not.

There are a number of online statistics websites that will spit out data on any industry on the fly. Here are some of the most reputable and widely used sites for obtaining data on what people are searching

Google Insights
Google Trends
Google Tools
Twitter Search
quancast
compete

So, I hope this help you in your effort to better market your website business through social media. If you have a suggestion or comment, just drop me a line below.