Twitter has finally begun to gradually introduce an advertising platform - Promoted Tweets – allowing businesses to publish promotional tweets. Since Twitter has revolutionized how we communicate online, it only makes sense their advertising program is a little different.

What do hotels need to know about Promoted Tweets?

There are 3 core principles of the program:

• Twitter will insert the ads into the Twitter stream, clearly label them as promotions, and give them all the functionality of standard tweets
• Ads are confined to the standard Twitter character limit (140 characters)
• Promoted tweets that aren’t attracting attention are to be pulled out by Twitter.

I listened to a number of insiders here at ad:tech San Francisco, and some of the key points that are emerging…

It works best if you’re already doing well in Twitter

Twitter CEO Evan Williams:

[Twitter ads] will definitely work best for companies who Twitter works well for generally

In other words, if you don’t adopt the mindset of being interesting and useful, you can’t simply buy your way into the Twitter community.

Relevance is key for success

Relevance is the big issue when it comes to Twitter advertising. Advertisers will bid on keywords based on a CPM basis initially, but Twitter intends to use a “resonance score” metric to see how much reach and impact individually sponsored tweets have. User interaction with ads will determine the price and longevity of specific ads.

On the Twitter blog, Biz Stone says if your message doesn’t connect with your audience, you’ll be removed:

There is one big difference between a Promoted Tweet and a regular Tweet. Promoted Tweets must meet a higher bar—they must resonate with users. That means if users don’t interact with a Promoted Tweet to allow us to know that the Promoted Tweet is resonating with them, such as replying to it, favoriting it, or Retweeting it, the Promoted Tweet will disappear.

Relevance – as measured by audience interaction – was core to the success of Google’s advertising model. Twitter’s development of the Promoted Tweets program seems to be the next step in the online advertising evolution. I see a strong chance for it to influence other advertising platforms.

Ads will begin in search results

ReadWriteWeb calls the scheme “delightfully boring“:

Advertisements will begin in search, with keywords being bid on and a single advertisement appearing with frequency dependent on its performance. Then the ads will be extended to 3rd party applications like TweetDeck and others…Finally, ads will begin to appear on Twitter.com, tailored to the interests of users, as easily observed by their messages published and received.

The benefit of Twitter advertising

The ads could become a good way to maintain visibility for important keywords (searches) if the stream is “polluted” with a lot of noise.

For example, many “hotel” related Twitter search queries are full of chatter useless to someone looking for (or working with) a hotel. Sponsoring a tweet that sits on top of this chatter stream could significantly raise your visibility and prevent it from being ‘drowned’ in other tweets.

Program timeline

Messages are currently limited to a small group of test marketers, including Red Bull, Starbucks, Virgin America. (All strong Twitter users already) Expansion of the platform depends how users will react to the Promoted Tweets platform.

Twitter hopes to eventually insert advertisers into the timelines of messages that users see from people they network with – when the message seems appropriate.

Key point to remember

Promoted Tweets values personal interaction. Advertising isn’t enough. You’ll have to focus on creating quality content that your fans love.

Dallas Lawrence says this well in his Mashable article:

During the past year, Twitter has trained successful online brand marketers, reputation managers, and digital thought leaders to focus on the “value of providing value.” Unlike almost any platform to date, Twitter has urged, nudged and down-right forced messengers to infuse value into the dialogue, 140 characters at a time. With Twitter now offering an expanded road map for pay-for-play engagement, those entrusted with managing online reputations forget these lessons at their own peril.

3 tweets, 1 big lesson:

That’s awesome. Especially the ‘dagger through r hearts‘ bit.

Look at how with one tweet – and actually caring – they turned a complaint into a very happy guest.

Forget about Twitter for revenue… are you providing service like this?

If you know a little bit about who is following you on Twitter, you’ll have a better idea of what topics will interest them. TwitterSheep, a cool tool I came across today, creates a tag cloud that illustrates this nicely.

Here’s the top keywords for people who follow me on Twitter @HMarketingHelp -

Many hotels use Twitter to communicate with their fans, but Fairmont is taking it a step further.

The Fairmont Chateau Whistler (@fairmontwhistlr) asked their Twitter followers for input in building a winter travel package. A poll was created where people could vote for the top activities they wanted included.

The result? A “Twinter Travel Package” that includes a fondue dinner and horse-drawn sleigh ride for two.

I want to see more of this. There’s a lot more we could do to involve our customers in creating new products.

After all, who better to ask than the people that will buy it?

There has been some buzz on Twitter how Wynn Las Vegas (@WynnLasVegas) built a following of over 300,000 fans within six months. While they do a great job interacting with their fan base, the sheer number of people following them is remarkable — especially when most big hotels fail to pass 10,000 followers.

So how did they do it?

According to @HHotelConsult, Wynn Las Vegas appeared in the “suggested user” list that people see when signing up for Twitter.

This is a massive advantage. It’s better than publicity, because now the hotel has a way to communicate with all these people. As the New York Times explained in an article this summer, those on this list become Twitter “kings.”

So maybe the bigger question is…

How did they get on that list?

To run effective Twitter promotions for your hotel, you need people listening. But what if you have no followers? Where do you start?

Note: this list is a little different from other “how to be popular on Twitter” articles in that I understand hotels need to maintain their brand reputation. Some of the more aggressive tactics used in other industries probably should be avoided.

That said, here are some proven ways you can get more Twitter followers – even if you have none now:

Leverage your reputation. You’ll notice most of the top Twitter users are celebrities elsewhere. Bringing their brand to Twitter helped them quickly grow a fanbase in the network. If people recognize your company, simply taking part will cause others to spread your message and grow your influence.

Leverage your existing web presence. If you have an existing online profile – large or small – use it to promote your Twitter account. This may be Facebook, your blog, or your main website. Link to your Twitter page and actively encourage people to connect with you there.

Tweet regularly. Predictable, regular updates increase the chance people find you. You’ll appear in the public timeline, Twitter searches, and the likelihood of people retweeting your message goes up.

Look at the big picture. Talk about things other than just you and your hotel. Depending on your target audience, this could range from business travel tips to art shows in your city.

Provide value. Why should people follow you? Have a compelling reason.

Tweet during peak times. For me, the most activity happens during US business hours. A leisure audience may be different. Test and find what works for you.

Give away free stuff. No, it doesn’t always have to be rooms. What else could you give away that has a high value for your audience, but costs you little? Free gets attention, if the offer is good enough.

Learn from the pros. It can be very useful to follow the top hotels and experts in your niche to see how they build their followers. Perhaps you can use some of the tactics yourself.

[photo credit: tanakawho]

More and more hotels are seeing Twitter provide actual sales, and as we move from “ain’t it cool” to power users, it’s time we had a toolbox to match.

Here are the best tools for anyone using Twitter…and then at the end are custom Twitter buttons we made just for you.

HootSuite

HootSuite

A “professional Twitter client,” HootSuite is a web-based tool with powerful publishing and monitoring features. The ability to manage multiple accounts simultaneously make this the tool of choice for many social media managers. The “future tweet” scheduling tool is something I use extensively because of my international audience in different time zones. Since HootSuite includes many of the features from the tools below, I use this tool exclusively for all my Twitter activity.

Read more…

Last week I caught up with Fairmont’s Public Relations manager, Mike Taylor, to discuss how Fairmont uses Twitter to communicate with their community:

Josiah: What’s your overall goal or strategy for Twitter?

Mike: On Twitter it’s about two things: developing awareness and understanding of what our brand is and what we represent. The second part of it is the engagement factor. We are interested in having a dialogue with the people that follow us — be it guests, media, travel planners, travel agents — we have a wide variety of people that follow us. So I tried to drill down and have a dialogue with all of these individuals that want to know more about us and want to speak with us.

The type of content do you try to share through Twitter?

Again, it’s a wide variety. We push out news and information; we think that’s valuable. We include package and rate offers. We don’t see Twitter primarily as a distribution tool. But if we have something that’s a great deal we’re going to let people know about it.

We are really trying to provide “behind the curtain” type of insider details that you may not know about either.

And we’ve also created specific hash tags that are audience specific. So we have one for our environmental news, and another for our travel agents when we’re speaking to that community. So we’re trying to use hash takes to funnel information down to a very specific focus and reach a certain audience.

Do you publish all of this yourself? I know you have hotels around the world — how do you work with individual properties — and how do you manage all of that?

At a brand level, I am the guy that does it all! I’m coming up with content — I don’t want to say we develop a publishing calendar, because that seems much too formal — but I definitely have information that isn’t time sensitive. That will be sitting at the ready for when there may not be much to talk about. I would say a high percentage of our content is either things that land on my desk that day, or else a result of what someone else has posted.

So at a brand level, I would say I’m the person that is responsible for all the content. But we definitely do have a number of our hotels at local levels that have Twitter pages. Their focus really tends to be on a local or regional market, trying to develop a presence there. They’re posting more on things that would be of interest to that local market. For example, maybe there’s a drink special at one of the properties they want to promote. So the content is a little more focused on the local, regional market.

I would probably say we have about half of our hotels on Twitter. The rest just leverage our brand level account.

How do you gain followers? You currently have around 6,000 people receiving your updates…

Our focus really isn’t on follower count. It’s certainly one metric we look at, but that’s not where our focus is. I don’t just randomly follow back anyone who follows us. We really try to follow people that are influencers, people that are interested — genuinely interested — in our brand and that we want to have discussion with. And of course we follow media.

But we definitely don’t just go out and start randomly following as many people as we can…just to bump that number up. That’s not natural, and that’s not why we’re on there.

Finally, give us a success story — what’s the best thing that’s happened as a result of your participation on Twitter?

Narrowing it down to one is a pretty big challenge! There’s been a few things. Twitter has introduced us to people we otherwise wouldn’t have a relationship with. So it’s sort of that global neighborhood concept where these people wouldn’t have reached out to us or vice versa if we were not participating. We wouldn’t have been able to develop relationships with other brands and other individuals which have been very beneficial for us.

We’ve had a lot of fun, but that’s a hard question to answer — there has been so much value we have received.

You can follow Mike’s updates for Fairmont @FairmontHotels

Today, I received an e-mail from someone saying that they are no longer following @hmarketinghelp because I update too frequently. At the same time, I have Twitter power users with more than 30,000 followers encouraging me to update more frequently…using automated tools if needed.

Which advice do I follow? More importantly, how frequently should your hotel update its Twitter account?

There are a few things to understand here. The less followers you have, the more common it is for one of the people you’re following to dominate your updates page. I know this happened to me.

Once you start getting more followers, this is less of an issue. Sure, there are spam accounts that churn out new updates every few minutes — around the clock — but those are pretty easy to detect and remove. Additionally, Twitter power users often use software such as TweetDeck and HootSuite to monitor specific terms and search queries — or follow their favorite users.

I think some common sense is useful here:

• If you have something worth saying, say it.
• If you have something particularly important, feel free to re-tweet it several times during the day (day parting).

I often do 3 to 5 updates in rapid succession several times a day. I think this is a natural way to update your account. As long as you’re not making 50 updates all at once in a five-minute minute session, most people don’t mind.

What do you think? How often do you update twitter? What do you think is the best update frequency?

Observing the masters is often the best way to learn. Today, let’s take a look at the top 20 Twitter users (by number of followers), and see if they can teach us a thing or two about using this site.

First, let’s categorize these accounts:

• Celebrities: 16
• News: 3 (if you include The Onion)
• Companies: 1 (Twitter)

Now, what can we learn?

Leverage your celebrity

Most of these people were already celebrities with massive followings. They simply used their existing fan base to reach the top of Twitter.

Oprah on Twitter

Ashton Kutcher on Twitter

Lesson for hotels: Use your popularity online and off to direct people to your Twitter account. This is one of the most reliable strategies available.

Read more…