Social Media and Your Travel Website
Posted on | November 18, 2010 | No Comments
What the heck is web 2.0? Do I need this for my bed & breakfast website? Do I need this for my travel agency? What about this “social media”, is that like facebook?
Studies show that 99.9% of small businesses online do not understand either web 2.0 or social media, but that 40% actually do it without knowing. Ok, I made those statistics up. I do know that every time I discuss social media or emerging web 2.0 technologies with my clients or website visitors, they get a funny look in their eyes and I can tell its time to start speaking English.
In plain English, Web 2.0 is the newer version of the internet we have seen since about 2004. Prior to 2004 you visited a website, learned some stuff or bought some stuff and went away. Maybe you left your email address so you could get stuff and are still getting spammed to this day.
That all started to change with the advent of Facebook and phenoms like blogging and tweeting. Things started changing from the norm of static sites to dynamic sites that changed and moved and interacted.
This is Social Media.
Do you need social media to promote your site? Absolutely. Do you need to have a Facebook page, a Twitter account, a LinkedIn account, stumbleupon, thissite, thatsite, thenext site and the bagofchipssite? No. You can, but I am pretty sure you would need staff to manage it all.
I know of a Realtor that has all of the above and more. The back of his card looks like a railroad track with all the lines of varying web addresses. Yikes.
The problem with much of the social media is the time sucking monster it can be. Our time is precious. Yes, you need social media and web 2.0 technologies to help promote your tourism website, but feel free to limit how deeply you interact with it.
For the basic small business tourism website I would recommend the following:
Get a Facebook Page (I will show you how to do this next week)
Upload a video or 4 to YouTube
Add a blog element to your website.
That’s it.
If you actually have the staff that has time to mange your social media, there are more opportunities I would be happy to share, just comment below and I can work with you on ideas. Be careful, if your staff leave, will you know how to manage it?
I will be posting more about social media and the SEO benefits it can have for your travel website, but go do some thinking about this. Ask your clients what social media they use. Would they stay in touch? What successes do your colleagues have and with what applications? Go research your niche and see what new information you can discover.
someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection…
Jane
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