Twitter for Marketing Your Vacation Rental

Is Twitter the answer for those missing bookings for your vacation rental? Maybe, but you need to use the right approach.

Now I’m not going to go on here about how you started using Twitter and immediately got sick of hearing about what people ate for breakfast. I’m assuming (hoping?) you’ve got over this stage already.

People join Twitter because they’ve seen other people using it. It’s a great story and this is certainly true around vacation rental owners. Once you’ve joined though, how do you actually use it to generate bookings?

Most people try the direct approach first:  ‘my vacation rental is available on 15th December’. Where are the inquiries though? Why doesn’t it work?

The problem is that your customers may not be using Twitter,  so they’ll never get to see your direct Tweets. Even if they are on Twitter, do they use it to look for your vacation rental?

Maybe.

Maybe there’s a small slice of people who search for info about your area. You might be able to pick up some interest that way, but may find that they are just looking for tourist info.

The best approach is to use something a little less direct, much like other forms of marketing. Here’s the plan:

Phase 1: Seek out relevant travel writers and tourist info websites with Twitter accounts – if they are savvy Twitterers they’ve probably published their address on their website or blog, so you can easily follow them. If not try the Twitter search facility (it works).

Phase 2: By following these people they should follow you in return and start paying attention to your work. It’s a pleasant surprise to see how many people follow you back, and it’s not all from auto-follow tools. If you are creating interesting and relevant Tweets then they may pay enough interest to retweet you, reply in public, or even write a blog post or article about you. If you’re feeling really brave, ask them!

Phase 3: This will increase your profile a little bit. If you do this enough you’ll start getting more attention. This is the best kind of attention – when other people start talking about you (and your wonderful vacation place of course)

These are just small steps, and don’t expect success overnight. The key is to start on the right path and take a long term approach.

PS. You can follow me @DrRichard42

Tags: Marketing, twitter, vacation rentals

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