With the introduction of social media models, the marketing strategies of online travel business have gone through a sea of changes. With the information travelling faster than ever, your potential customers keep themselves abreast of the latest news in the travel industry. Thus, if you do not keep face with the fast-paced information ecosystem, the competition is likely to leave you behind.

To adapt to this rapidly evolving promotional landscape, many online travel companies are now embarking on the Twitter bandwagon. Twitter is an online networking service, having over 300 million users worldwide. Believe it or not, a sizable portion of your potential customers are using this social networking tool on their mobile devices on the move. Therefore, it is increasingly critical for your online travel business to devise a well thought-out strategy in order to tap into this potential demography.

1. Resolve Customer Issues in Real-time

Today an increasing number of your prospective customers voice their views using 140 characters on Twitter. Therefore, a minor unresolved issue tweeted by one of your customers will spread across the industry like wildfire. Unless you are paying a close attention to your customer’s complaints on Twitter, the consequences can adversely impact your prospects’ decisions to choose your services going forward.

Twitter can be a very effective tool to attend to your customers complaints in real time. It takes just a couple of minutes to create a Twitter account and customize your Twitter page for your online travel business. There are many Twitter tools and plugins to help you keep track of what your customers say on Twitter and addressing them quickly enough.

For example, there are many customers who may need your help to resolve one of the issues related to a technical snag during online ticket booking on your website. Twitter enables you to reach out to such customers immediately and resolve their queries quickly enough.

2. Promote Travel Deals to Customers

Thanks to the sheer presence of potential customers, Twitter has evolved into a favorite destination for promoting lucrative travel deals many online travel companies use on the Internet. Today, your potential customers use Twitter to stay abreast of the latest travel deals offered by the competition.

Interestingly, a promotional tweet about your travel deal can fly thick and fast across your target audience on Twitter, helping your voice reach out to a large number of prospects. Online travel businesses having creative tweeting skills can benefit from their Twitter campaign to an inconceivable extent.

3. Monitor Your Online Reputation

According to statistics, Twitter generates over 300 million tweets and handles over 1.6 billion search queries on a given day. Owing to these burgeoning figures, even a single tweet reflecting some negative sentiments by a potential customer can make or break your industry repute.

In such a tweet-sensitive scenario, online travel agencies should actively use Twitter to monitor their online social reputation. An online travel company, for example, can keep a close watch on their customers who are talking about them on Twitter. This way, they can reach out to the origin of a negative and potentially damaging tweet and look into the issue immediately.

Even a hoax tweet about your services can be potentially dangerous to your social repute if it goes unnoticed and unresolved.

4. Acknowledge Customer Loyalty

Twitter is a great tool for building customer loyalty in rapidly evolving online travel industry. For an online travel business, there are many ways to build your customers loyalty. Even a simple tweet acknowledging the gratitude of a satisfied customer could go a long way in building positive atmosphere for your business.

Twitter also opens up many opportunities for online travel companies to share the statistics of their growth and achievement, helping foster the bonding between their business and customers. In return, the customers will retweet your tweets, helping your reputability grow organically.