How to use social networking to connect with potential group clients

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg and TravelTribe give you a new channel through which to build your group business. But social network marketing is very much a “people first” channel in which building relationships is the primary concern. This means you have to change your marketing mindset. It’s not a business talking to a consumer; it’s person-to-person communication, akin to talking to friends and neighbors at a backyard party. “It’s a ‘people first’ philosophy—the sales will come later,” says Denise Vogel, director of social media for OSSN.

Social media marketing means using a social network to establish your identity—your brand—as a person and travel expert, and then dropping in low-key references to the specific travel experiences that you’re marketing. It’s a way for you to create groups, fill them, manage them and use them to generate new business.

There are more than 200 million active profiles in Facebook (www.facebook.com), according to Nolan Burris, chief “visioneer” for Visionistics and a frequent speaker covering social media. Sixty percent of Facebook’s users log in every day and 30 percent essentially never log out. The site’s largest number of users is between the ages of 35 and 54. Facebook is permission-based—you’re only “friends” with people whom you choose to befriend.

Twitter (www.twitter.com),  a relative newcomer seeing meteoric growth—its users have jumped from 1.6 million a year ago to an estimated 32.1 million in May—is wide open. It’s a micro-blogging website whose users give updates on themselves and what they’re doing via 140-character “tweets.” Anything you post is available for the world to see. Another tool is the recently relaunched TravelTribe (www.traveltribe.com), which is a travel-centric social networking site, a place where consumers and travel experts can meet. Having all these new avenues for marketing open to you can be a little overwhelming, but think of them as an extension of your other marketing tools, says Janet Engel, social media enthusiast and director of sales in the central U.S. and Canada for Holland America Line.

For example, you can build groups through several methods in Facebook. You can use it to reconnect with friends from the past—high school and college classmates, colleagues from old jobs—and help them rediscover you and the fact that you sell travel. But you also can go beyond networking with people you know already. You can join groups, which you could view as one giant chat room. Type in “skiing” and you’ll pull up a group with 80,000 members. Search “Italian food” and you’ll turn up multiple groups with not just postings, but photos and videos of pizza making.

You can join one of the countless Facebook groups focused on something you love—for instance, Disney, Chinese cookery, a sports team or wine tasting. You can establish your credentials by showing your knowledge of restaurants in Beijing or train shows, gradually work in casual references to your travel expertise, and occasionally drop in the fact that you’ve got a trip—“I so love Barolo wines and, by the way, I’m leading a tour of Piedmont and its great wineries”—that members of your group would love.

Your third option is to build a business page. In this instance, your “friends” are “fans,” but the marketing principles remain the same. Companies as varied as Contiki, Westin Hotels & Resorts, Southwest Airlines and Norwegian Cruise Line do this. Having a business page is like having a mini-website of your own right in Facebook, complete with your own logo.

Some agents use a combination of these tactics. Toni Sofos, a home-based agent team manager for Clearwater Cruises in Palm Harbor, Fla., markets through both personal and business pages. She networks with old friends using her personal page, reconnecting not just with her former high school classmates (it helps that she’s in charge of her high school reunion for a class numbering 900), but also with elementary school friends.

“I’m not pushy at all,” Sofos says. She uses quizzes to start conversations—“Top Five Hotels I Have Stayed In,” “Top Five Places I Want to Visit”—and is planning a summer vacation photo contest. But Sofos also built a business page about Clearwater Cruises and invited friends and clients to join. If she books a group, she creates a Facebook group of friends (not a business group of fans) and uses that to develop the group’s relationship and build excitement about the trip—which means some of her clients will invite other friends to the group. She sends out a “specials” email about once a month to both friends and fans, just to get calls going.

You also can promote events in Facebook—anything from a group departure or a cruise night, to a travel show or presentation you’re planning. You can advertise in Facebook, and these are some of the most highly targeted ads you can do anywhere, according to Burris. You can target your ad so it pops up only in front of your target market—and you can drill down with this, defining age range, gender, employers, hobbies and the like. Pricing is based on how much you want to pay per day and can start at as little as $5 per day for a set number of ads.

Twitter is another way for you to market yourself as a travel expert. You can view it as a way to have multiple conversations with not just one or two other people but many, says Chelle Yarbrough, CTC and head of Travel Web Marketing. You can use it to learn from others, as well as position yourself as an expert.

Ron Stiles, owner of Majestic Vacations, is using Twitter to reposition his business as a fund-raising company, and one selling ADA-accessible (Americans with Disabilities Act) cruises and groups. He’s using it to build his image as a specialist in these two areas and has a two-part Twitter strategy. He’s “following”—that is, he has elected to receive—the tweets of suppliers that he deems important to know about for his business. He follows other companies that he believes are pursuing practices he wants to emulate. Some suppliers use Twitter to market their specializations. If you follow them in Twitter, you can re-tweet—that is, pass on their tweets to your followers, demonstrating how plugged in you are as a travel pro.

Stiles also is seeking to attract “followers”—people who track his tweets, because he’s providing information of value to them. So, he might post travel hints or re-tweet something from a supplier that he believes would appeal to his target market.

It’s important to re-tweet, says Yarbrough. It adds value for those who are following you. With Twitter, as with Facebook, you can have a personal or professional identity. You can opt for a “mash-up,” which is what Yarbrough does, mixing professional thoughts, advice, re-tweets and the occasional marketing tweet with personal tweets, such as her daughter’s volleyball team’s score. “That makes me likable,” she says, because it gives the personal touch. But she also has a business Twitter account where she posts frequently. She says that retail agents and agencies may want this type of account and use it to post travel information, updates and hints.

TravelTribe is a social network with a core focus to help consumers find travel information as well as connect with travel experts. When a consumer types in “beach vacation in Jamaica,” TravelTribe comes up with not only relevant destination content, but also information on trips that other travelers have taken to Jamaica and on travel agents who are experts in selling Jamaica. “What we’re doing is creating a dialogue between you, the agent, and the consumer who’s thinking about taking a trip,” says Mark Murphy, CEO of TravelTribe, and president and CEO of Performance Media Group, which publishes Agent@Home magazine.

TravelTribe is a place to feature your travel experiences—the places you’ve been, complete with blogs, photos, videos and maps. The more active you are on the site, the higher you’re featured in search results. It’s another opportunity to showcase your knowledge and experience, and build your brand as an expert whom consumers will seek out. Murphy stresses the importance of being helpful, not commercial, in tone. You can invite people to join your TravelTribe. And as your customers’ certified travel expert, you’re featured on their profiles as well, giving you yet another viral marketing opportunity.

Does it sound as though you could be spending all of your time updating your social networking accounts? Never fear. There are a variety of tools out there to help you manage your multiple accounts. For example, the blogging site Wordpress (http://wordpress.com)  has a plug-in that will automatically post your blogs to Twitter or Facebook. Twhirl (www.twhirl.org),  Tweetdeck (http://tweetdeck.com)  and Ping.fm (http://ping.fm) can help you manage multiple Twitter accounts and cross-post to other social networking sites. That means you need only post once, not multiple times. TravelTribe also links with Facebook and Twitter, automatically posting your entries.

Using social media to establish your brand and identity to an already interested group of people means that you can eliminate practices such as cold-calling from your marketing tasks. Recognize that it takes some time to grow your networks and find your voice. Create a social media marketing strategy by defining your goals and audience. Once you do start publishing in Facebook, Twitter, TravelTribe or other social networking sites, update them regularly.

To keep social media from sucking up too much of your time, Vogel advises scheduling a time, say 20 minutes each day, using tools that let you send out tweets at set times throughout the day, so it looks as though you’re tweeting when you are actually working on other tasks. Remember, opportunity today doesn’t knock—it chirps, buzzes and pings! @

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