Flightster

Travel tweeters and meerkats with Klout

• by Jools Stone
• on November 11th, 2010
• 10 Comments

Don't leave home without your Poken, the social media business card

Unless you’ve been living in a treehouse in the wilds of Alaska (do they even have treehouses there?) you may have noticed how valuable a tool Twitter has become for anyone looking for travel tips and inspiration. Just look at the  Twitchhiker phenomenom.

Traveller Paul Smith set out to hitchhike his way around the world in March 2009 relying solely on the kindness of strangers on Twitter. His updates were published in the Guardian newspaper and led to a book deal, raising over £5,000 for charity Water Aid into the bargain.

It’s amazing how far 140 characters can take you sometimes and surely most travel companies will be wise to this fact by now, but how many truly engage with it?  

Britain’s Big Bird Brands

Recently I came across this run down of the Top 30 UK Brands on Twitter assembled by Sutro Digital. Now this list just looks at cold, hard follower numbers (and excludes celebrities) but still paints a telling picture of the social media landscape of Britain today.

Let’s leave aside the depressing fact that many of the top spots are occupied by tacky fashion brands if we can and look at the handful of travel companies on this list shall we? These include British Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Heathrow Airport. I don’t follow any of these, but presumably ticket giveaways and the need to be updated on the hoof of the latest travel disruption news are big factors, not to mention their existing brand power.

The fourth travel organisation in the list is our very own VisitBritain (yay, go TeamGB!) Our national tourism body has 15,000 followers and sits at number 16 in the rankings. There’s not a single big hotel group or holiday company among them though.  

No mere Meerkat

At number six (some notches above all of the travel players) is Compare the Market, a car insurance comparison site with one of the most loved advertising campaigns in recent years. For those of you outside of the UK here’s a clip.

Why the hell is something so mundane as a cost comparison site riding so high then? It’s all about personality and fun. Tweets are delivered by the advert’s mascot, Aleksandr Orlov the vaguely Russian-sounding Meerkat who alongside promotional plugs, tweets about everything from his frustrations with his put-upon sidekick Sergei to his ancestors’ long held rivalry with mongeese.

Aleksandr also interacts with the public a great deal, and all tweets are delivered in his signature comedy broken English, Eastern European voice. Even crowdsourcing requests sound unmistakably unique:

‘I am still undecide where is best place to open shop? It need to be the most sophisticate street in whole of Englands. Any ideas?’

Top 50 Influencers

Just a few days ago a new twitlist was launched: the Top 50 Online Influencers in Travel. This one is based on Klout scores. Klout’s method is a little more advanced than simply counting follower numbers. It attempts to rank people by their interactivity on both Twitter and facebook.

It takes into account things like how many people RT (Re-Tweet) your posts, how many people send you @messages and how many twitter lists you appear in. It also looks at the people you tweet with and their influence.  Such metrics should always be taken with a healthy cup of salt of course, but it is interesting to see how individuals (mainly travel bloggers) seem to be doing better than big travel brands so far.

Gary Ardnt, himself number two in the list currently, has already written an insightful post on this subject so I won’t echo him too much but I think the secret can be found in how people interact on twitter. If you put a personal touch into your tweeting and embrace the community aspect of it you might find your Klout score edging its way up.

Travellers’ Night In

Many of those high ranking travel tweeters are there because they participate fully in the community. They take part in Travellers’ Night In (or #TNI, to give it its hashtag) a sort of weekly travel ‘chat room’ on twitter, organised by Zip Set Go, with 10 set questions around a particular theme.  Recent ones have included the UK’s top destinations, a Halloween special on ‘spooky travel’  and the Canadian Rockies. Another rather popular little twitter critter, the immaculately dressed @Banff_Squirrel, had a hand in that last one.

They also answer travel questions, recommend other people to follow, RT other people’s tweets (and sometimes get RTd in return) acknowledge and thank those giving such recommendations and generally engage with their community.  

Ignore it at your Peril!

So what happens when you don’t engage?  Any big travel company is bound to attract its share of criticism. Things go wrong and customers feel let down. It’s very easy to vent some spleen by firing off a quick tweet to some anonymous company. You don’t even need to look out their email address anymore.

Here’s one example for you. British commuter train operator First Capital Connect seem to be in the tweet wars quite regularly. Word has it that they are not terribly responsive to the many messages and mentions made by their frustrated passengers on Twitter. Such is one customer’s ire that they’ve gone to the trouble of setting up an RT Bot which spews out any and all mentions of @FirstCC, good, bad or ugly. And oh my some of it sure is ugly!

Get on the Radar

Probably the best way to get on travel tweeters’ radars is to get stuck in, start following travel people,  interact a bit (without spamming)  and also make sure you tag your tweets with the hashtag #travel when appropriate. Some also use the #lp hashtag which stands for Lonely Planet, one of the highest ranking travel tweeters. But be careful not to over do it with the hashtags or your tweets will swiftly become unreadable.

If you want to make doubly sure you could always get yourself listed. The Travel Trade Gazette’s Matt Parsons has set up a massive list which all travel tweeters can submit their details to. It’s updated weekly and shared publicly, so make sure you get yourself on it and take a look at who’s there already.

For the future I reckon those who spend a fair bit of time on twitter will get themselves a Klout account and start to update it regularly. Let’s hope they learn from those little twitter critters and get into the interactive spirit of things too.

Jools Stone

Jools Stone's blog, He Thought of Trains, chronicles the highs - and occasional lows - of traveling by train in an age of budget flights.