LEVERAGE – THIS IS ALL ABOUT LEVERAGE – THESE NETWORKS GIVE YOU THE POWER TO COMMUNICATE WITH ONE PERSON YET BE EXPOSED TO THOUSANDS!
Facebook, Youtube, Twitter – right now you may think that these sites are just for fun and friendship – but in today’s article I am going to dispel this and reveal to you how using these sites can change the way you can communicate with existing customers to increase follow up sales, gather new customers and leads and build relationships with your customers like we’ve never seen before!
Technology is changing the way people do business – by learning how to harness these latest techniques and strategies you can seriously blow your competitors out of the water and increase your business exponentially!
You may or may not be aware of Social Networking – however you would have definitely heard about some of the more popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. To this point – you will probably not understand what this has to do with you or your business – but read through this article to understand WHY you should be using these sites and HOW you can be drawing free web traffic and and increasing sales via using them as tools!
In short – Facebook alone is to date getting approximately x5 the amount of traffic of GOOGLE! Now isn’t that phenomenal! Youtube is also incredibly popular – but it is the technical aspects of using this channel which will surprise you and Twitter, well despite popular belief that only twits use Twitter this tool is making it possible for people to get short direct messages to large audiences in a matter of seconds -in just 9 minutes of once making a tweet regarding a particular website I had over 200 visitors through to the site! This is EASY once you know how! Smart business owners who know how to combine and leverage these 3 basic sites – can create swarms of FREE, WARM leads and traffic to their websites in minutes!
“in just 9 minutes of once making a tweet regarding a particular website I had over 200 visitors through to the site!”
The reason Social Networking works so well in Tourism – is fun stuff always happens – people like to share fun things, especially videos and photos! Also, if people are coming to your website and then following you on Twitter, Facebook and Youtube they will be constantly see YOUR BUSINESS appearing – now when it comes time for them to do a tour who do you think they will think of first?? YOU, that’s exactly right – because you have had a chance for the customer to already get to know, like and trust you – the hardest part of the selling process has been taken care of!
I will briefly explain the benefits of using these 3 core sites below – and these are just the core – there are still many others you have access to by using simple channel distribution tools.
You may have noticed something called ‘Twitter’ appear on the radar in recent times – although it has been off to a reasonably slow start in Australia it is quickly taking the world by storm! We’re starting to see it everywhere, TV – just recently footy stars tweets were quoted, we hear about it on the radio and you may even use it as a way to communicate with friends – but HOW can this work in business?!
In short it is possible to target the people you follow; ie you can use special sites and programs and even just the basic search function to let’s say – if you were a Dive company, you could search posts for tweeters talking about diving and add them as friends, you can also search for your locality and add people that way, then when you’re doing tweets – say you make a tweet and you have 10o people following you on Twitter and each of those 100 people have a friend list of 50 people you have instant exposure to over 5000 people – should any of the tweeters want to share your information!
It is also a great way to drip feed information out to previous customers and also possible prospects!
Facebook has taken the whole world by storm! Just about every man and his dog is on Facebook. There are a few things you can do with FB.
1) Advertise within the FB network – the beautiful thing about this form of advertising is you can totally specify who sees your ad and you only pay for results – ie it is calssified as ‘PAY PER CLICK’ so you onl pay when someone clicks on your ad to go through to your site. With FB you can specify the location, age, sex etc of the people who will be seeing your ad! A very SMART way to market.
2) Fanpages – You can create a Fanpage for your company where people can choose to follow you – this works like gangbusters with Tourism Businesses as humans like to be defined by the things they do – ie if someone has just had a blast on your tour ie whitewater rafting (thrillseekers), wine tasting (socialites), Whale Shark tour (adventure seekers) – they will be likely to join your fan page if given the opportunity – which gives you exposure to their lists.
- YOUTUBE / VIDEO MARKETING
The BEST thing about Youtube is that it gives you the opportunity to showcase your business to the WORLD! People love VIDEO and I have ways to upload a video once and distribute to over 40 different channels (can you see where leverage is coming in to this yet??) Video really gives you the opportunity to build a relationship with your prospects / customers but the BIGGEST SECRET is that people love to SHARE videos – which means -that’s right – MORE EXPOSURE FOR YOU! For free – seriously, it’s FANTASTIC!!
Not only that, as if it couldn’t get any better, but every time you load and distribute a video you get to use KEYWORDS, then when people share your videos and you embed them in your website you increase your rankings on the search engines and have the opportunity to be found on page 1 of search engines, for many different search terms!
IN CONCLUSION – please don’t feel overwhelmed – although it is A LOT of information to take in – this is very easy to apply once you know how!
Sharing – ie writing about your tours/business, taking photos and video from tours and putting them on Twitpic or one of the photo tweeting sites, Flickr and Facebook is a great way for new people to find you and exisitng/previous clients to remember you, as people love to share COOL things! Twitter also gives you the ability to drip feed information about your business and tours to your followers – thus – keeping you at the forefront opposed to your competitors – once a customer has found you – if they’re interested enough – they will choose to communicate with you IF YOU GIVE THEM THE OPTION!
The days of having a standard brochure style website are GONE! The companies who choose to build a relationship with their site visitors will stand more of a chance of getting those visitors to book with them – not only for the fact that you will be constnalty reappearing in their radar but also because they will have got to know your business!
Social Networking is all about building relationships and sharing what you have on offer – as per the usual ‘word of mouth’ referrals – if someone absolutely loves what you have done they will WANT to tell their friends about it!!
You can also ask people to share their photos and experiences on your Fanpages etc then passed customers also get to meet and interact with each other – it is absolutely MIND BLOWING and right now it may be overwhelming – but stay tuned – subscribe to the Newsletter – I will be running a course in the very near future to reveal all the shortcuts and SECRETS to be able to leverage these sites and make it a simple step by step process!!
Make sure you have subscribed to our monthly report to be informed when I run this phenomenal training session!
(plus you get a heap of other great FREE stuff and up to date information to keep your business ahead of the pack!)
The social networking sites linked to Tourism Web Marketing are still being developed as it is a new business, but to see some in action check out:
http://youtube.com/KatHudsonTV
