Twittering in the Maldives Travel & Tourism industry.

Maldives on Twitter

I always wondered about how many companies are twittering in the Maldives, especially from the Travel and Tourism industry.

Twitter’s mild beginning was during 2006 and caught the hype during 2007 in a festival. So much for the twitter history! You can look it up on Wikipedia.  Let’s get right into twittering!

Twittering, also known as micro blogging is important for the industry that we rely on. Few reasons that your company must have a corporate twitter account and start twitting are:

1. The traffic and the crowed we are looking for are there,  connected, via a follower or twitter search
2. Gain exposure for company, websites
3. Build a reasonable network with transparency and trust
4. Market the products, services, events etc.
5. Answer questions about your products and services
6. Learn new things from other industry professionals
7. Share travel tips, trends & resources
8. Meet and talk with others in the same business
9. Stay connected wherever the clients/readers are
10. Seek out industry colleagues for assistance with special projects
11. Better understand social media
12. To keep thorough with industry updates from the Maldives and abroad, of course all the big travel companies that you may be interested in have twitter. Sorry but not in the Maldives.
13. Find out what others say about you in real-time and act on it, mind you most of these are real stuff coming from good and bad minds, so be prepared!

I believe these are of absolute importance where your market is almost 100% on social media.

Recently I had a chat with some of the prominent members of the Maldives travel sector, particularly, travel agents and I found out that either they have no clue what twittering is or how it can be utilized for business. Some even told me “why do we need it? We have our agents from around the world”. No need to blame the blokes, as this is relatively new as a medium for marketing.

Just to ease my curiosity on the Maldives Tourism sector on Twitter, I ran a small search and found a very seriously poor representation of the industry on Twitter.

Here are some of the travel and tourism companies currently on twitter.

@bandosmaldives
@innermaldives
@letsgomaldives
@capitaltravel
@villahotels
@crowntours
@intourmaldives
@maldivessoffers
@yourmaldives
@holidayinnmale
@atolltrip

Ok, this is the deal; we have 280 Travel Agencies, 95 Resorts, 13 Hotels, 24 Guesthouses, 344 Safari Vessels including dive boats and 77 Dive Schools registered and running (not all) in the Maldives. All I could get is the above twitters? That is less than 1% of the industry. A bit shameful, isn’t it? Even if other companies and establishments exist on twitter, I could not locate them for the following reasons:

1. Have accounts but not twitting enough,
2. Don’t have accounts and don’t bother or don’t know about twitter.

Again, trying killing my curiosity, I searched the twitter with the term “Maldives”, and I found no tweets from any of the travel industry establishments in the last 24hours. But, I found many tweets by agents from abroad trying to promote “Maldives holiday products” from the respective companies. However, on the edge was @innermaldives, sending their last update little over 24 hours back. Keep it up guys!

My advice is, if you are not in the hype yet, get into it and here is how!

Getting Started

• Lookup a Twitter name that matches your company name or alternatively a name that includes your company name such as @companyteam
• Build up a level of tweets so other users will see you as credible and relevant – the minimum number of tweets that you should accumulate before you start promoting your account is somewhere in the 50 to 100 range  (most users will ignore you if you have few tweets or haven’t been tweeting for very long)
• Fill out your profile completely including a URL as most people will not follow anyone with an incomplete profile
• Create a customized Twitter homepage (that matches your corporate brand as much as possible) to provide additional information about your company and products

Getting your message out

• Try to tweet 5 to 8 times per day, and you should space them out throughout the day if possible
• Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message – the others should be tweets about related topics that provide value to your followers or show a more human side of your company; people will stop paying attention to you if you use Twitter exclusively for self-promotion
• Most of your tweets should contain a link to a website, blog post, article, etc. – these  are the types of tweets will establish your Twitter account as being a source of great content and worthy of being followed back
• Use HootSuite’s to schedule your tweets and to track your tweet clickthrus and their Hootlet app to easily tweet the URLs of content at the source – Hootsuite also lets you include multiple users on the same account which can help to spread out the Twitter workload
• Don’t over-tweet. It’s annoying. Seriously!
• Add a Twitter widget to your website for easy access to your tweets and to gain new twits!
• Provide resources or items of value.
• Be creative and have fun with it!

Following people

• Use one or more of the Twitter directories (WeFollow or Twellow) to locate potential users to follow based on their interests and geography
• Follow anyone who mentions your company or keywords that important for your business
• Follow the twits that follow you…unless they are spammers.
• Periodically do a Twitter search on your company name or click on @yourname from right panel to see who is re-tweeting you or mentioning your name
• @reply people to thank people or to just reach out to them
• RT or re-tweet posts that you think are worthy – generally these people will notice and start following you
• You don’t want to grow your Twitter following too quickly – steady growth is better and a goal of growing 100 to 200 per month is a good start for most businesses

And finally for Corporate Twittering, you should:

• Be honest
• Be responsive and human
• Be nice

I got some of the above stuff from @tomhumbarger

Don’t you think that we can do much more to promote the destination on social media better if we really try and work hard?

Go tweet guys!

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