Part Two of Four: Social media tips for the travel supplier

In part one I discussed strategy, deciding who you want to talk to and what you want to say. How looking to the messaging and audience is a must do before opening up social media accounts and submitting content.

In part two, I am still recommending that social media accounts are left unopened.

There is still more work to be done before a travel supplier should be creating socially distributed content.

Part Two: Start monitoring social media, make it a customer service and marketing priority

As I discussed here, consumers are turning more and more to social media sites to help them get more information on brands.

So it is important to set up the infrastructure (readers or monitoring tools) that scrape social media and review sites and serve up mentions of your brand, competitors and (if relevant) location to customer care and marketing teams.

Use this in the first instance to listen to what people are saying about you, your brand and competitive landscape.

Then settle and agree on the response you will take to various mentions.

For example:

Agree the format for Twitter responses when customers make queries and complaints.
Appoint some one in customer care to respond each day to negative (and positive) reviews on TripAdvisor.
Find the forum(s) where customers are talking about your area or product or experience and monitor what is being said about the brand (eg Flyertalk or frequentflyer.com.au).
Publish an internal social media policy that encourages your staff to be watching, consuming and participating in social media. But make it clear when they can and when they can’t speak for the company in a response.

In summary. build up a list of tools and set up an agreed and actionable plan for monitoring and responding to social conversations about your brand.

This will initiate your involvement in discussions initiated by consumers and prepare the ground for (hopefully) exerting some influence over that conversation.

Important points to remember:

Influence is achievable but control is not.
Be clear in your understanding and expectations.
You will not be able to exert control over social media as it is word of mouth at the speed of light.

Combining parts one and two is the first step in setting a social media plan and help you find your voice, primarily by deciding which of your customers want to talk to and what you want to say.

The next rung on the ladder is to start monitoring all of the mentions of your brand in social media so that you can learn what is being said already by which segment of your customer base.