Twitter Explained for Vacation Rental Managers

Learning how to use Twitter isn't complicated. A simple overview can put you on the fast track to social media success.

Twitter is a strange bird (pun intended). Many people, especially those used to Facebook, can have a hard time picking up Twitter and utilizing it to their fullest. But, it doesn’t have to be confusing. In fact, once you learn a few basic concepts, Twitter is actually really easy to use.

It’s a great place for sharing content, getting advice and giving advice, and following the news. If used correctly, it can be a great tool in your marketing arsenal, both for disseminating your messages and for listening.  In the following blog, I will attempt to briefly describe Twitter and how to use it.

The main distinguishing feature of Twitter is brevity. On Twitter, you can only post in 140 characters or less. Because of this people mostly use their Twitter posts (called tweets) for short one-line updates, or use their posts as a headline and then insert a link that people can click to learn more. This makes Twitter a great place to get a breakdown of the “news” you care about. Now while many journalists are now breaking stories online, I use news in a more general sense. If you want to see what’s going on in the world as it relates to some topic, Twitter is one of the best places you can go…if you set it up correctly.

Let’s say I’m interested in the travel industry. I’d want to start following people important in the industry: journalists, brands, thought-leaders, etc. If I follow enough people, I’ll get a good idea of what’s going on in the industry all throughout the day. Not too many big things happen anymore that don’t make it on Twitter.

Twitter Lists

Now let’s say I’m interested in multiple topics, and now that I’m following so many people from so many industries, it’s hard to keep up with my feed. For example, if you follow 1,000 people, you’re likely to get a new update to your stream every few seconds. Twitter anticipated that and they created a list feature. Now, you can put any one of your contacts on one or more lists. So, if I want to follow only people in the travel industry, I’ll just go through and put those people on a Travel Industry list. Using programs like TweetDeck and Hootsuite, I can view those lists in separate groups making them easy to follow. And, for people who don’t want to spend the time making a list, they can just follow a list someone else has made. Listorious.com is a great place to search for these Twitter lists.

Hash Tags

Let’s say you want to follow just one topic or one event. Twitter has what they call a hash tag. To make a hash tag, all you have to do is enter a # before a string of characters (without spaces). This is a great way to follow conversations about a certain topic, even if you’re not following everyone who talks about it on Twitter. You have to be careful with hash tags, though. Hash tags are at their best when a group of people designate a certain hash tag for a certain topic. For example, the hash tag for this year’s 2011 Vacation Rental Managers Association (VRMA) Conference was #VRMA2011. Anyone tweeting about the conference could include that hash tag in their tweet and then anyone following that tag could get their update, even if they weren’t following that person.

Mentions

Another cool feature of Twitter is an @ mention. Let’s say your tweet involves someone else on Twitter or might be important to a specific Twitter user. You can mention them in your tweet by including the @ tag and then their Twitter handle (for example, @LiveRez). That person will see that you mentioned them in your tweet when they check their mentions. It also creates a link back to that person’s account from your tweet.

ReTweets

ReTweets are a quick and easy way to share a tweet from someone you follow. All you need to do is hit the retweet button below their post and the post will be sent out to all the people who follow you. Good content on Twitter is often retweeted, and sometimes will even go “viral” because it becomes so popular.

DM (Direct Message)

If you want to send a private message to another Twitter user, you can do that through a DM (direct message). This type of communication is not used as much on Twitter as it is on other social networks.

How Twitter is Different

Twitter was designed to be more public. It’s more about sharing with the world, than sharing with your friends. You should know that everything you do on Twitter is public (besides DMs), unless you protect your tweets. If you decide to protect your tweets, only the people following you will be able to see your tweets, and people will only be able to follow you if you allow them to. However, very few people protect their tweets, especially if they’re trying to use Twitter professionally.

So, there you have it – the basics of Twitter. Do you have any advice for using Twitter? Have a question? Leave a post below using our Facebook comment plug-in (oh, the irony). And keep an eye out for an upcoming blog, where I’ll discuss the top 10 ways to grow your Twitter following.