4 Twitter Mistakes to Avoid

February 3rd, 2012
Twitter Mistakes

Twitter Mistakes

140 characters may seem too short to make a mistake, yet here are a couple common things to avoid.

  1. Twitter is about making personal connections.  Avoid being too ‘corporate’ or ‘sales-ey’
  2. Don’t forget to respond to direct questions quickly.  Check out your Twitter feed daily for mentions (@) and search your company name.  This will quickly allow you to find conversations and join them quickly.  You can even set up your Twitter feed so that it appears on your screen as a live stream.
  3. Some people only post pre-scheduled tweets.  Don’t forget to join the live conversations happening in our industry.  You’ll be amazed at what you’ll learn and who you’ll meet.
  4. Your photo or logo is imperative!  If you’ve not uploaded a photo or logo, Twitter will insert an ‘egg’ for you!  How impersonal is that!   People, especially your clients, need to see YOU!
  5. Participate in Twitter Chats.  You’ll have a chance to meet fascinating people and learn from your peers.  I find that I meet so many interesting people and begin to follow them.  The bonus is that some follow back.

If you’re interested in tips & techniques to begin your foray into Twitter or grow your following, we’ll cover essential strategy and best practices for the travel & tourism industry in this audio podcast.

Check out this relevant short audio podcast.  I’m interested in hearing your success stories. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

How to use Questions on your Facebook Page

January 31st, 2012
Facebook Questions

Facebook Questions

The “Questions” feature on your Facebook page is a secret tool to easily and quickly add a customized question directly to your page.

You’ll find this feature on the Share bar on the top of your Wall.

I find this underused tool generates more attention because the photos of your respondents appear beside their answers.

Question Strategy

When you leverage this tool to learn from your clients you’ll better understand their interests and upcoming travel dreams.  You may ask them questions like:

  1. What’s your favorite city to visit?
  2. What you’re favorite beach?
  3. Which would you rather do on vacation…lay by the pool, visit an ancient historical site, hike, learn about a unique culture, take classes in cooking or wine tasting.
  4. If you could be on vacation tomorrow, where would you go?

Consider seeding your answers and including YOUR top selling destinations or upcoming group departures. Then follow up this question with posts on the destinations or activities that are most appealing to your audience.

For industry examples of contests, polls and landing pages, click here

Think about the potential!  Tour Operators can ask what destinations clients would like to visit.  Hotels could have guests vote on a new color scheme.  Attractions could test out interest in a new feature.  Travel agents can poll clients to learn what they’d like to buy!

I challenge you to start engaging your fans now. Start with the warm welcome of a landing page, entice them with a contest and discover their desires through polls.

What questions have you asked your clients recently?  Which questions do you need to ask?

For other tools to leverage your business success on Facebook, check out 3 Tools and 6 Contest Best Practices, 2 Polling Tools.  Jumpstart your fan engagement! and 1 BIG way to Gain Attention for your Social Pages. Land more clients!

Let’s keep the conversation relevant. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

2 Polling Tools. Jumpstart your fan engagement!

January 27th, 2012
Polls

Polls

Want to Jumpstart your clients Facebook experience?  Want to land more new fans?

Polls are a powerful way to engage people as you’re asking their opinion…what person doesn’t want to express their likes and opinions.

The key is to ask relevant questions that will help you understand your audience and then aid you in putting together relevant posts as well as new tours or additions to your attraction, hotel or destination.  It’s a bit like dating; the better questions you ask the better you get to know your date!

Facebook has a number of intriguing polling applications to make your queries pop on your page and help you understand the analytics of the answers.

Polling Tools

“Polls” application.

Download the app by searching “Polls” in the Search box or clicking on the above link.  You’ll find a dashboard to fill in the blanks and create your poll. As you continue thru the process you’ll be provided with a Viral Dashboard that gives you a variety of methods to promote and spread your poll to your fans and others in your circle of influence.

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This would be a great way for a Travel pro to identify which destinations clients would like to visit.  Hotels and attractions can use polling to figure out which amenities or features are prized by guests, thereby enabling the company to build on its successes.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

  1. Easy to use
  2. Invite 8 people to participate at a time
  3. The feature to publish on Fan pages you ‘like’ is useful if you want to engage a wider audience.  I believe one would want to be an active participant on a Fan page before you put a poll onto another page.
  4. The Direct Link is really helpful if you’d like to send an e-mail blast to your clients and invite them to your Facebook page and the poll.

“Poll Daddy” application

Images and photos are a huge part of the draw to this polling application.  Imagine if you were going to poll your clients on their favorite beach and you were to add a photo of each of their choices.  Powerful!  This is a great opportunity to learn what is most attractive to your clients and what you can emphasize in your next newsletter, e-mail blast or conversation.

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Advantages and Disadvantages:

  1. Add an image when you enter your question.  As we all know photos and any type of graphic will draw attention and encourage people to act. Tour Operators will love this!
  2. Customize the answers available in your poll and add an image with each answer.
  3. The next cool feature is that you can select who you’d like to see your poll.
  4. If you’re interested in expanding your client base (and who isn’t) you can check ‘Friends of Friends’ so that you virally reach a wider audience.
  5. In addition, you have a chance to write a comment about this poll thereby bringing some context to your question.
  6. Invite as many friends as you’d like!
  7. Add and delete polls on a dashboard

These Facebook applications will make your page visually interesting and stand out from other pages your clients may browse.

The key benefit to polls is that once your client answers a poll or interacts in any way with your page, their friends will see their involvement.  This is an easy way for you to attract the attention of friends of your fans.  What a way to leverage your new business leads!

For other tools to leverage your business success on Facebook, check out 3 Tools and 6 Contest Best Practices and 1 BIG way to Gain Attention for your Social Pages.   Land more clients!

What questions have you asked when polling your clients?

Keep in touch as I’m interested in hearing of your successes. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

3 Tools and 6 Contest Best Practices

January 20th, 2012
Contests

Contests

Contests are quickly becoming an engagement tool perfectly suited to our industry.  See what’s happening by searching “Contests” on

Facebook for a list of contests, sweepstakes & promotions

When you consider developing your own contest here are some of the platforms that are Facebook approved;

Facebook has very stringent rules on contests and sweepstakes, so please make certain to use an approved contest building platform and carefully read the fine print.

Pricing varies as do inclusions such as mandatory liking and uploading ease.

When a client of mine wanted to generate more ‘likes’ as well as user generated photos for future advertising,  we created a custom landing page (see the previous blog post 1 BIG way to Gain Attention for your Social Pages.  Land more clients!)

for their Facebook page and their website.  A new banner and long profile on these sites was created to tease and intrigue fans.

In the first 5 days of the contest 60 new ‘likes’ were generated as well as 40 photo entrants.  It’s an exciting way to take your social presence viral.

Best Practices

  1. Plan your goals and strategy
  2. Integrate your strategy across all your sites; website, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn.
  3. Powerful Call to Action!  Relate your call to action to your goal.
    1. Create a photo contest that focuses on a specific new tour you’re promoting.
    2. Make it FUN & Easy!
    3. Measure & monitor your successes.
      1. Measure click-thru rates
      2. Assess sales as related to your contest
      3. Track new ‘likes’
      4. Use Page Insights or another monitoring tool
      5. Leverage your involvement in other social platforms.
        1. Tweet about your contest using an appropriate #
        2. Put info onto your LinkedIn page
        3. Join conversations on Twitter and Facebook to spread the word of your contest.

Generating more ‘likes’ and, most importantly, more fan interaction takes hard work, the right tools and marketing savvy.  When you check out these tools, plan your marketing calendar and pull the pieces together your fans will multiply!  There is magic in that!

What contest platform have you used?  What was your opinion of it’s ease and simplicity?

What other tips and best practices would you add to this conversation?

In the next post, we’ll look at polling tools. Subscribe to this blog to make sure you don’t miss out!

Let’s keep the conversation going! Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

1 BIG way to Gain Attention for your Social Pages. Land more clients!

January 15th, 2012
Custom Landing Pages

Custom Landing Pages

Psst…Want more fans?

Social media is changing constantly and unlocking secrets to fan engagement.  While we’re all looking for the magic elixir to engage, enlighten and eek more revenues from clients here are some techniques that are working exceptionally well in our industry.

These free tools provide the resources to know more about your fans and potential clients.  We’ll start with landing pages here today and future posts will focus on contests and polls.

Landing Pages

AKA Welcome pages and Splash pages.

Did you know that people are 67% more likely to ‘like’ your Facebook page if you have a custom landing page?

While adding these pages is an advanced project, it will bring you results.  See examples of industry leaders; Shebby Lee Tours, Sports Travel and Tours, Princess Cruises. A technically savvy client used the Wildfire I-Frames application to build his landing page in about 2 ½ hours.   I’ve chosen to have my web designer build a customized page for my site.

Applications:

Best Practices

Many travel pros are keen to try these powerful fan engagement tools so let’s look at a couple of best practices to make the most of your time and effort.

  1. Set goals of what you’d like this new Landing page to accomplish.
    1. Do you want to promote a new package, get more likes, promote new photos, promote a consumer night or group departure?
    2. Would you like people to visit your You-Tube channel to see your latest destination videos?
    3. Would you like to invite fans to your blog or newly revamped website?
    4. Take the time to get the graphics right.  You know the saying about a photo and 1000 words.
    5. Once people arrive at your page, provide relevant, fresh content that offer a unique value!
    6. Most importantly, have a call to action!  Make it very clear what you’d like visitors to do once they see your new landing page.  Then make it easy for them to help you achieve your goals.

As you’re considering your options keep in mind the design time and effort you’ll invest in this project and compare it to hiring a professional designer.  Lastly, have some fun with this exciting medium.

Let’s keep the conversation relevant. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

The Secret of Timing. Social Media Success.

November 30th, 2011
Time Management

Time Management

Are you finding it hard to fit social media, audio and video podcasting and blogging into your work day?  So many people I meet when I speak at conventions are challenged by how to prioritize their time and talent.

Every day

In my experience I’ve found success by setting aside a specific amount of time each day for social marketing.  This enables me to batch different tasks; research and write, record a couple of audio podcasts at one time, write a series of blog posts and turn articles into pre-scheduled Facebook posts and tweets.

Additionally it’s helpful to:

  • Check Facebook pages for comments and respond quickly
  • Scan Tweets and look at specific hashtags (#)
  • Read industry highlights and comment

Every Week

Each week I try to run thru the groups that I belong to on LinkedIn and answer questions, read material that’s newly posted and connect with those I’ve met during a recent conference.

In addition, I look at my Page Insights on Facebook and assess what’s been successful.  What posts have gotten the most attention, what links have the most click thrus and where my new fans are coming from.  These answers provide me the tools to tweak my upcoming posts.

When you commit to staying involved with your marketing efforts you’ll find that clients seek out your expertise and pass it along to their friends. Imagine filling your next group tour, selling your hotels’ group allotment or finding new sources of visitors to your attraction all thru the power of social connections.

Here’s another post that’s related:  How to Find the Time for Social Media

When you find yourself too busy to research and post, here’s the solution for you.

Let’s keep the conversation relevant. Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Social Chats that Yield Business

November 25th, 2011
Twitter Hashtag

Twitter Hashtag

On Twitter, there are some really cool conversations happening that bring together groups of people at a set time and date.  Think of combining a sales seminar and information meeting into 1 format that joins people from around the world.

This is a reality when you gather around a hashtag (#).  You’ll need a moderator and a conversations managing tool. For resources and a checklist, please click.

When you join a Twitter chat here are couple of tools that will make your chats easier.

Transcripts

If the moderator provides a transcript you can refer to it and connect with others on the conversation and download the links provided in the conversation.  Check out Chirpstory.com and TweetDoc.org to create your own transcript.  By merely typing in the # and the date of your conversation, these tools create a full transcript along with photos of participants.

Platforms

Some people participate in Twitterchats directly from Twitter.  When you use the search key and search the # you’re chatting on, you’ll eliminate other miscellaneous tweets that enter your stream.  Then simply hit the refresh key often to see the stream in real time.

Other people find that using Tweetdeck or a similar platform provides a cleaner stream of tweets.

Opportunities

There are so many opportunities to use Twitter chats and here are a few of my favorites:

  • *Wedding & Honeymoon Travel specialists:  Twitter Chats are a great chance to meet with a number of brides to exchange ideas
    • This can be a benefit you offer to your clients—a chance to ‘talk’ with other brides about their plans, best ideas, on-line wedding resources, etc.
  • *Cruise only travel agents:  Imagine meeting on Twitter with a select group of your top clients.
    • Learn what they love about cruising then use this info in your next marketing campaign
    • Exchange ideas for the next group departure
    • “Ask a Travel Pro”—think about the opportunity to gain new clients by hosting a weekly or monthly Twitter Chat
      • People can ask questions based on a pre-selected topic; you share your expertise.
      • You can leverage this and gain new clients as well as more insight into what people are interested in—great fodder for your blog and your sales/marketing pitches to clients
  • *How about getting together with new corporate clients to review how they can use Twitter while on the road.
  • *Attractions and hotels:  Great way to meet with your top tour operators and conduct focus groups to learn their needs.
  • *Destinations can meet with their tour wholesale clients to learn what they would love to see in your destination.  This will be a chance to update them on the latest and greatest sites and activities in your area.
  • *Tour Operators can meet with their travel agent partners to listen and learn
  • *Tour Operators:  how about meeting with your group leaders to learn their needs and build a more creative product

Keep in mind that your conversations may be picked up by the media making interviews and greater exposure possible.

  • 2 out of 5 journalists get all their news from Twitter

How have you used Twitter Chats in your business?  I challenge you to start using this tool today!

See 4 Secrets to find Captivating Content, and discover how others find great social content!

You may also find these posts helpful:

Keep the conversation going! Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

4 Secrets to find Captivating Social Content

November 18th, 2011
Google Alerta

Google Alerts

Do you ever wonder where people find compelling social content that inspires conversation? Where do they find relevant blogs and photos to attract new clientele to their tours? Where do they find those funny videos that show the right amount of ‘funny’ about their destination?

The mysterious ‘they’ out there have discovered the secret to sharing information. Let’s explore their secret!

Whether you’re beginning your foray into social media or are an expert, here’s a list of creative ideas to inspire you.

Content Sources

  • Set up Google Alerts and be the first to learn of new articles that fit your key words. Google searches blog posts, news and the web for those keywords and delivers it to you. Tour operators may want to set up alerts for the destinations they serve. Some marketers set up alerts for their company name or destination as it’s a great chance to see what people are saying about you and respond.
  • Search blog posts at Technorati. This is an opportunity to respond and connect with future clients and media thru the blogosphere.
  • Use the search functions on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to hear what the ‘woman on the street’ is thinking. When you join those conversations you’ll engage with potential clients you may not have had an opportunity to meet in the traditional marketing or sales arena.
  • Check your own backyard. What FAQ’s do you hear? What trivia intrigues your guests? Is there a new recipe that has people lining up at your hotel or restaurant? Travel agents—what questions do you hear from your new clients? Blog, Tweet and Facebook it!

When you seek out and connect with potential brand evangelists, thought leaders and influencers in these mediums you’ll find that your own social media following will grow exponentially.

Other posts you may find helpful:  3 Tips to Write in Less Time

Successes

Where have you had success in finding content for your postings? It would be great hearing and sharing!

Let’s keep the conversation relevant! Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

2 Social Tools You Don’t want to Miss

November 11th, 2011
Video Blog

Video Blog

If a photo is worth 1000 words, imagine what a video will do for your social content?

Research has shown that adults are downloading video from Facebook posts and Twitter feeds more often than written content!

Photos and Videos

Original photos, video and blogs rule the internet today!  Let’s explore how to create and market quickly and easily. Best practices tell us to get creative and then use this new material in as many different ways as we can.

  • Contests are a fresh new way to generate photos and videos.  If you’re going to implement a contest or sweepstakes on Facebook you need to be certain to use an approved platform.  Check out Wildfire or Offerpop.  A client of mine recently rolled out a photo contest and in the first 5 days generated 39 fabulous photos to use in their next brochure or marketing piece.  In addition, they generated new fans and virally spread the word to fans and their friends. By the end of the contest they had gained nearly 500 new fans.
  • Audio or video podcasts are a unique way to give people another medium to get to know you and your services. Did you know that “Video on your home page increases Google ranking by 50%” Think of the power of a video made by one of your clients that showcases their time with you on a recent group tour.  This video serves not only as a testimonial, but shows other potential clients the ‘real scoop’.   For tips and resources to generate your own audio or video recordings please click here. Remember, audio and video posts to Facebook and Twitter yield higher click-thru’s and engagement than other posts.

The audio podcasts that I’ve produced have given me an introduction to new clients as well as a medium to invite clients to upcoming events.  There are so many creative ways to use these powerful tools.

How are you using photos and videos in your social presence? Keep the conversation going! Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

4 Ways to use a Video Blog

October 21st, 2011

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how valuable is video?  Think about how popular You-Tube has become.  Wouldn’t you love to have that impact on your clients?

Think how thrilled your clients will be to see you in the destination you’re blogging

about.  Think CREDIBILITY!  Think VIDEO!  Have you considered these techniques:

Video Blog

Video Blog

  1. imbed it into your blog post and add text to supplement your recording
  2. create it as a stand-alone video and post it on your You-Tube channel
  3. embed your video into an e-mail using eyejot or vimeo
  4. provide a link to your video in your next e-mail blast

Tip:  test out your smart phone for video quality.  I would suggest making sure it’s HD.  If you would like a top of the line (and affordable) HD video camera, check out the Mino Flip.  I love how easy it is to use—1 button!

When creating your video keep in mind that 2-4 minutes is the preferred length.  If you need more time, simply create a series of short, snappy videos.

When you begin to explore using these technologies you’ll find exciting ways to differentiate your business and appeal to a wider audience.  Your expertise and enthusiasm will attract clients, news media and the attention of your preferred suppliers and partners.

What video success stories do you have to tell?

Let’s keep the conversation relevant! Connect with me on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Get in Touch with Catherine

Catherine welcomes you to phone or e-mail her with your needs and interests. A preliminary discussion will help determine whether Customized Management Solutions may help you drive the results you’re looking for.

Contact Catherine Heeg