How the new changes to Twitter could benefit holiday letting owners

Last Updated on June 14, 2016 by admin

Twitter is a vital tool for holiday homeowners and agents to get closer to, and effectively engage with those wanting to stay in their holiday cottages. The key word in there is ‘engage’; as many will have found over the years, Twitter is far more effective as a marketing tool when interacting with other accounts, rather than a repeated broadcasting of a sales message.

With this in mind Twitter have made some changes that could help you interact even more with those potential holiday letting guests. Here we explain what changes are being made and how you can use them to your advantage…

Longer conversations – @usernames will no longer take up characters

To have a conversation with another Twitter user you need to mention them in your tweet. By including their @username you’ll currently be using vital characters (remember you only have 140 to spare each time). Mention two or three other accounts and that’s half of your allocated limit!

Moving forward these mentions will not be included in your character count.

What does that really mean for holiday homeowners and agents? More space means more conversation and more potential bookings; remember that less than half of the tweets you send should be about yourself, your property and your location.  You want to be engaging with others, so if the balance isn’t currently there with your own tweets make sure you take advantage of this development and get chatting – you will see the benefit in bookings!

Media attachments no longer included either!

The news gets better; attachments (currently included in the character count) will also no longer for a part of those magical 140 characters.  Why’s this such good news? As a holiday homeowner or agent the one thing you should be doing is making your social media presence visual; lots of photos of the local area, sunsets, that garden you’ve worked tirelessly on and anything that might entice those bookings.

Using imagery on Twitter significantly increases click through rates and your visibility to anyone scrolling through that heavily populated news feed.

If you’re wondering what constitutes an attachment on Twitter it can be any of the following:

• Images
• GIFs
• Videos
• Polls

On average these currently use up 24 characters; make sure you make the most of that extra 17% of space in your tweet by sharing as many photos and videos as you can, and include a link to get them back to your website to book.

Some other neat changes to Twitter…

You’ll now be able to re-tweet and quote yourself.  Why’s this good? It’ll save you a significant amount of time not having to re-write a tweet you want people to see again (for example if you have some last minute availability or have won another award you’ll be able to quickly re-tweet it rather than re-writing it).

This is particularly helpful as the popular tweeting platform Hootsuite has stopped sending tweets that are repeatedly the same or extremely similar in nature.

The end of the .@ rule

This won’t be known by all Twitter users, but if your tweet starts with a ‘@username’ your tweet will go directly to that user. If you add ‘.@’ to the mix it can be seen by everyone.

This will no longer be the case in coming months, meaning that all of the tweets will be seen, allowing you even greater reach.

So more conversation, more images and more reach; there mightn’t be a better time to get your holiday cottage bookings through Twitter.

When will the changes be made

Twitter have indicated they’ll be making these changes over the coming months, so get ready to take full advantage once they hit your account!

Boshers offer specialist holiday home insurance to owners across the UK. For more information on how a specialist insurer can help and support your holiday home business, please give us a call on 01237 429444.