Why Use Twitter (X) For Your Tourism Business?

For tourism businesses, X can form an integral part of your digital strategy - it’s the digital version of word-of-mouth, and ignoring its potential might mean missing out on valuable connections, promotional opportunities and important insights.

This platform offers a unique blend of real-time communication, brand visibility, and audience engagement. By leveraging X (Twitter) features, businesses can tap into new markets, strengthen their brand loyalty, and showcase what they have to offer on a global and digitally active stage.

X and Tourism

While X might not be the primary platform where users directly book trips (like dedicated platforms such as Expedia, Booking.com, or airline websites), it plays a significant role in influencing travel decisions. Users might discover new destinations, read reviews, or interact with travel influencers and companies before heading to a dedicated booking platform.

Benefits of X for Your Business

• Brand Awareness: Regular posts, interactions, and well-curated content can keep a brand at the forefront of consumers' minds.
• Real-time Engagement: The real-time nature of X allows businesses to engage with customers instantly.
• Drive Traffic: By sharing links to their website or blog, businesses can drive traffic and potentially convert X users into customers.
• Market Insights: X is a valuable tool for gauging consumer sentiment and trends. By monitoring mentions, hashtags, and industry conversations, businesses can gain insights into market needs and perceptions.
• Content Distribution: X is a platform where businesses can share their content, from blog posts and videos to imagery, special offers and news updates.
• Trend Awareness: With features like "Trending Topics," businesses can stay updated on what's currently capturing the public's attention and find opportunities to integrate relevant trends into their marketing strategies.
• Customer Feedback: Many users turn to X (Twitter) to share their travelling and tourism experiences. This feedback, whether positive or negative, can be invaluable for refining service offerings and managing brand reputation.

Top Tips To Get You Started

Start promoting your tourism business on X and build a digital presence that engages and interests your target audience.

Creating a Business Profile on X

Once you have gone through the basic steps of creating a business profile on X, you’ll want to tailor it in order to represent your brand.

• Profile Picture: Recommended 400x400 pixels. Use a high-quality logo or relevant image for your business.
• Header Photo: Recommended 1500x500 pixels. This could be a branding image, advertisement, or another relevant graphic.
• Bio: You have 160 characters to describe your business. Make it concise and compelling.
• Location: Input your business's location.
• Website: Provide your business website URL.

Once you have created an X profile, you can start following other relevant accounts, interact with audiences and post your own branded content.

Posts

Posts are the hook that will draw your target audience in. Be sure to post regular and engaging content that your audience will find interesting. Follow these tips when creating posts;

Be Brief

Make your point clearly and concisely. While the character limit has increased from 140 to 280 characters, shorter posts can still be more effective.

Use Hashtags

A hashtag (written with a # symbol) is used to index keywords or topics on X, allowing people to easily follow topics they are interested in e.g. #DiscoverNI.

Hashtags help people find what they are looking for easily, it is worth researching which hashtags your competitors and target audience are using frequently in order for your brand to get noticed. However, avoid overloading your post with them. One to three relevant hashtags per post is often recommended.

Use Engaging Visuals

Images and videos can help make your posts stand out and increase audience engagement rates, it is especially useful for tourism-based brands where visual appeal is paramount. Ensure that visuals are high-quality, interesting and relevant.

Image Sizes

X recommends the following image sizes for posts;

• Optimal size: 1600x900 pixels.
• Aspect ratio: The preferred aspect ratio for X in-stream photos is 16:9.
• Minimum size: To appear expanded in users' feeds without needing a click, the image should be at least 600x335 pixels.

However, remember that X will display in-stream photos as a rectangle with a crop in users' feeds. If there are essential details in the image, it's best to keep them centred to ensure they aren't cropped out in the preview.

Engage and Mention

Start following industry leaders, competitors, partners, and other relevant accounts. This helps in networking and keeping updated with industry tourism trends.

‘Mentions’ are how you talk to someone on X, helping to further your audience reach, while also interacting and starting conversations with other businesses, new audiences, or speaking directly to customers.

• Mentions: Using the "@" symbol followed by a username is how you mention someone on X. This is commonly used to address or reference other users in posts.
• Positioning of the Mention: In general, it doesn’t matter where in the post you put the @mentionbussiness, but common practice is usually to place it at the beginning of a post.
• Full Stop Before @name: If you begin a post with ".@Username", the post will be treated as a regular post and not a direct reply, making it more broadly visible to all your followers in their timelines.
• Visibility of Mentions: You can mention any user, even if you don't follow them. They'll typically receive a notification of the mention unless they've changed their notification settings. Similarly, any user can mention you in their posts.
• Public Accounts: The visibility rules apply to public X accounts. If a user has a private account, then posts, whether they start with a mention or not, are only visible to their approved followers. In other words, your business profile should be set to public.

Advertising

Ads on X allow businesses to target specific demographics, ensuring that promotional content reaches the most relevant audience. Compared to traditional advertising mediums, X can be more cost-effective in a tourism marketing campaign.

X (Twitter) Toolkit

Please download our toolkit on (Twitter) X page management for beginners

Paul McGarrity from Octave Digital shares some tips and advice on making the most of the channels available to help grow your business.

As part of the Tourism Enterprise Development (TED Programme) Paul McGarrity, Octave Digital delivered a webinar about Social Media and Search Marketing for Tourism.