Twitter and Facebook as Travel Marketing Tools

Twitter followers and Facebook likes are for sale as marketing tools for travel websites and bloggers.

How to use Twitter as a marketing tool for websites? Let's start with basic vocabulary:

• tweet is like a text message with 140 character size limit, tweets can contain links and images
• retweet or RT works just like forwarding an email except you can’t edit retweeted messages
• hashtag is a string that begins with hash sign (#) and hashtags can be used for searching tweets
• bot is a program or script that automatically sends tweets or/and retweets posts, can also manage following and unfollowing people, and react to tweets sent by others
• #ttot means Travel Talk On Twitter, it is mostly travel related spam.

There are basically two kinds of tweets:

1. Retweets of the old tweets of others for receiving reciprocal retweets
2. Advertisement of own blog posts. For example: 6.94 ABSOLUTELY Vital Travel Tips http://www… via @blahblahblah #ttot #oldpost

Tweets are not for initiating a real discussion. Most tweets appear to be written by bots, and unfortunately majority of the followers you will attract are bots, too. Don't trust on the amount of followers some people have as followers can be bought just like likes can be bought on Facebook. The ongoing rate (see the link below) for Twitter followers is US $320 for every 5 000 delivered in 2–3 days. Facebook likes are a bit cheaper: US $70 for every 1 000 fan page likes. If someone buys for example 100 000 Facebook likes, their cost and value is US $700. Here is for example one website selling likes and followers: https://audiencegain.com/.

Another marketing tool on Twitter are live public chats and marketing competitions. Chats are identified by a hashtag, they include 5-10 questions asked by a host, and a sponsor organisation who is paying for the host and giving the prize which is usually a gift card. For sponsor, competitions are marketing, the host gets paid for his work, and the handful of participants can demonstrate their wits to each other. In order to participate in the competition, participants are required to follow both the host and the sponsor, so anyone participating can expect spam after the chat is over.

After spending one and a half months on Twitter, we noticed that Twitter is suffering from the same problem as all social media: they encourage talking but not listening, which is far from ideal marketing. We are no longer using Twitter or Facebook.