Okay, so I promised in a post last week that it would be the final word with our evangilising over the Twitter phenomenon.
But then everyone went a bit bonkers yesterday after Hitwise released quite amazing figures showing Twitter's ten-fold increase in traffic over the past year.
UPDATE: Hitwise tells me this morning that 1.3% of all Twitter traffic goes to travel sites - the top recipients including Google Maps, National Rail, Expedia and British Airways.
As the Travel Weekly blog has already pointed out, two of our rival sites led their email bulletins with the shock news.
I immediately posted a question on Twitter about whether this sudden enthusiasm was some kind of Tipping Point for travel media?
Some of the replies were rather cruel [email me for the best] but one did suggest this indicates, in not so many words, that the bandwagon has well and truly started for travel with Twitter.
Fast forward a few hours and the debate kicked off on a Travelmole story - with one commenter taking a critical and very defensive stance about engaging in Twitter. Take a look here.
I'll repeat here one of the comments I left:
"The point to all this is that IT DOESN'T TAKE ANY EFFORT to just try something as simple as Twitter.
"Lastminute.com, for example, has 650 people following its updates (Expedia has a quite astonishing 1,500). If these firms sold just ONE deal as a result of someone reading an update on their twitter pages then that would be a good thing, surely?
"Especially as it probably took the marketing person approximately 30 seconds to post that update.
"I only say it would be foolish to ignore the opportunity. Like most forms of social media and innovation on the web, it is easy to try something and if it doesn't work, move away almost as quickly as you started."
Whatever your stance, this is a fantastic debate, nonetheless. Expect the debate to really take off in the mainstream media when the likes of the Daily Mail runs a typically alarmist headline along the lines of 'Twitter blamed for mortgage crisis'.
I jest.
Here at Travolution we have evangelised plenty about Twitter, but this is still for one reason alone:
There is a potential marketplace in this particular social network (no-one truly knows what it is) and conversations are taking place there which are about travel and travel brands in particular.
To simply dismiss Twitter as a fad (indeed it may well be in 12 months time) and therefore not engage in it is missing the point.
So what if it's just This Year's New Thing? New things can bring about unexpected results, but you'll never know unless you just try it.
The fact that twitter has over 750k registers user's is something not to be sniffed at. The potential for all businesses (like the Lastminute example mentioned) is that it possible for everyone to carve out a small niche where you are able to keep perspective customers in the know. Its entirely possible that your tweets can generate sales... Where else can you get that kind of exposure for free?
Speaking of twitter demonisation in the MSM - there was this barely researched tosh from India Knight in the Times a few weeks back.
http://tinyurl.com/9fxpql
Amusingly, if you google 'india knight twitter' the top result is not that piece but the tweet that originally alerted me to it... :)
We've found that twitter has been amazingly useful in keeping our readers up to date with our adventures. I don't think we've seen even the start of twitter's potential for marketing - I think it's going to be an interesting year!
It's amazing what Twitter has done for my site. I love it.
I am a 60 years old Italian "girl" who has been reading The Sunday Times since the times of ......Katherine Whitehorn, Mulcom Muggeridge, Jilly Cooper, etc..
For the first time in my life I am lost as I cannot understand what has been written in my beloved Sunday Paper. What does Twitter mean ?
Am I out of touch, am I Alzheimer or whatever else ?
I suppose I should surf the internet to get the sense of the term, shouldn't I?
Grindolin
We'd be very interested to see an update to this post - particularly how twitter downstream traffic has changed since January along with the massive take-up it's seen from consumers since then.
@cheapflights_uk
I think Twitter is going to be around for a while, mainly because it's so easy and quick to use. It's also difficult to spam, because if a user writes lots of useless 'tweets', then it's unlikely that anyone will want to 'follow' them. With Twitter, the cream will generally rise to the top.
Hi agree with Karl, the potential for businesses is huge if they take the right marketing tack. But more importantly. for travellers in the like they can get advice on their trip, instantly, from someone in the country they are visiting for free. What could be better?