Twitter Marketing for your Airbnb Vacation Rental

Twitter can be a powerful platform to market your Airbnb vacation rental business, allowing you to create your own distinctive brand and engage with your target audience in real-time. With over 350 million active monthly users, you will be sacrificing a significant audience and the opportunity to engage with them meaningfully by not utilizing Twitter to its maximum potential. Read on to find out exactly how you can use Twitter to market your Airbnb vacation rental.

Top 10 Tips to Market your Airbnb on Twitter

1. Set up right
2. Be Strategic
3. Have an Authentic voice
4. Engage the Audience
5. Know when to Tweet
6. Get Interactive
7. Use Hashtags Wisely
8. Use Twitter Advanced Search
9. Tap into the Power of Influencers
10. Monitor your Performance

How Does Twitter Work?

Twitter is a mostly text-based social media platform that is easy to use and free to join and utilize. It limits each tweet (akin to a single post on Facebook or Instagram) to 280 characters, though users can annotate this with images or short video clips (up to 140s). Users can also get around the word limit by creating threads, which are a string of tweets, presenting a longer proposition via capsule thoughts.

Twitter is known for informing people and generating conversations. It is also a faster-paced platform than Facebook, with the shelf life of a single tweet considered to be four times shorter than a Facebook post.

Why Use Twitter To Market Your Airbnb Vacation Rental

Twitter is an often overlooked social medium with regards to marketing Airbnb vacation rentals (and other products/services as well). However, it can be a great place to market and grow your Airbnb vacation rental business, if you do it right. Here are a few reasons why Twitter makes a great tool to market your Airbnb.

To Stand Out

Twitter being a relatively underutilized platform also presents your brand with the opportunity to stand out more easily and carve out your own voice and space against bigger players and before similar-sized competitors arrive having realized its potential and crowd out the space.

To Engage Audiences

Because Twitter mostly revolves around providing information and creating conversations, you have the opportunity to engage with users on a personal level by providing them value by giving them information they need or want, opportunities that they are interested in, and dialogue that they enjoy.

To Create Long-term Relationships

Unlike following a brand on Facebook, users on Twitter are more likely to have a more personal relationship with the brands that they follow, due to the more authentic and ‘human’ nature of Twitter conversations as well as endorsements by verified celebrities as well as family and friends. This however takes time and effort.

To Provide Great Service

Twitter can often act as a customer contact/service platform with users tweeting or direct messaging their queries and complaints. In fact, big brands like Airbnb have a separate Twitter account (@Airbnbhelp) just to handle questions from their customers. You can use this to your advantage by ensuring to respond quickly and resolve your customers’ issues rapidly. Satisfied customers may even praise you publicly for the level of service you provided.

To Convert Users to Customers

Once you find your voice and your authentic (brand)self on Twitter and begin to engage and excite audiences, creating a loyal following, you will begin to see users convert to paying customers. Tweeting out coupons and discounts exclusive to Twitter can help speed up the process.

To Reach International Audiences

Of the 187 million users that access Twitter daily, 80% are not based in the US. This makes Twitter not only a great platform to establish your Airbnb vacation rental brand internationally but also gain international travelers.

How To Use Twitter To Market Your Airbnb Vacation Rental

Marketing your Airbnb vacation rental effectively requires forethought, strategy and real-time responsiveness. Your tweets need to be targeted and pack a punch if you are going to get people to pay attention to you and take action.

1. Set up Right

Joining Twitter is easy. Making sure your Twitter account represents your Airbnb vacation rental business in the best way possible takes effort.

• Pick the right Twitter handle for your brand. Usually, this would be the name of your Airbnb but if it’s not available make it as close to your brand name as possible. Also, make sure it is not too long. People prefer shorter handles for tagging due to the character limit on Twitter.

• Use your logo as your profile photo. Make sure it is a clean image and can be viewed even when compressed as many people utilize Twitter on their smartphones.

• Use an attractive image as your header image or cover photo. This can be a fantastic picture of your property or something that showcases your offering in a creative way.

• Optimize your Twitter bio. Use short words or phrases to express your brand, what it offers and what makes it unique. Make sure it targets the audience you are hoping to attract. You can even include a shortened link to your website.

2. Be Strategic

Do your research and find out how you can offer value to your potential audience in a way that is better than what your competition is doing or not doing at all. This could be providing information about the location of your Airbnb vacation rental or being an authority in relation to a unique feature of your property. For example, if your Airbnb vacation rental is a tent cabin, you can offer information, tips, and advice on all things glamping.

Your content strategy on Twitter should also align with your overall social media strategy, across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.

3. Have an Authentic Voice

Having a human tone of voice is important on Twitter. Users will expect an authentic expression of your brand so use tone, language, and levels of emotion, humor, and formality to create your unique self on Twitter. For example, a historical property with a ‘Cali girl’ voice will seem fake and put audiences off. On the other hand, you could choose to temper its authentic historical voice with biting humor, which is immediately attractive.

4. Engage the Audience

Because Twitter is designed to be conversational, it is a great platform to engage with users meaningfully. Pose a question. Conduct a poll. (In fact, polls are a strategy employed often by Airbnb on Twitter to engage with their followers.) Ask for advice. Direct message users. As long as you stick to authentic expressions of your brand, you can be more personal and real without putting people off.

Don’t forget to show your audience that you value them by interacting, liking, retweeting, and following. You can even tag them when appropriate.

5. Tweet Smart

Knowing the best time to post for higher engagement with your audience can be extremely useful. According to Sprout Social, the best day to tweet is Wednesday, followed by Tuesday and Thursday. The best times are 9am-3pm on Wednesday and 9-11am on Tuesday and Wednesday. Saturday is the worst day.

However, this is only a generalization and each audience has its own unique quality. The best approach is to use this as a guide and test your tweets to see what days and what times work best for your audience.

6. Get Interactive

Don’t stick to text alone. Take full advantage of Twitter’s features and post images and videos. Tweets with images and videos outperform those without. Images can be photographs, infographics, or other graphics. Tweets with quotes and numbers also do better. According to Twitter:

• Photos average a 35% boost in retweets
• Videos get a 28% boost
• Quotes get a 19% boost in retweets
• Including a number receives a 17% bump in retweets

7. Use Hashtags Wisely

Using a hashtag can boost a tweet by 16%. Don’t be afraid to get on the bandwagon of popular hashtags when they are trending either. Just make sure the hashtags you use in your tweets add context to your tweets.

According to Buffer, tweets with hashtags enjoy 21% more engagement if you restrict it to just one or two. Those that use three or more hashtags experience a 17% drop in engagement.

8. Use Advanced Search

Twitter Advanced Search is a useful tool to find users interested in your type of vacation rental offering and convert these potential guests. Use terms relevant to your Airbnb business, such as ‘luxury’, ‘quirky’, ‘tent cabin’, etc. Once you find people who have shown interest in propositions similar to yours, reach out to them directly.

9. Use Influencers

Instagram is perhaps the best-known social media platform for influencers and product placement though its effectiveness is sometimes debated. Twitter on the other hand offers a more authentic and believable platform to use influencers to promote your brand. A zero cost and highly effective way of utilizing the power of influencers is to ask your guests to tweet their reviews, tagging your handle. You can also reach out to influential travel writers though be prepared for them to not give you a great review if they didn’t feel your Airbnb wasn’t up to their mark. Don’t expect a great review just because you provided them with a free stay. There is also the route of paying influencers to promote your Airbnb vacation rental though that can be costly.

10. Harness Twitter Ads

Consider Twitter ads such as promoted tweets and conversational ads if you are only just starting out on Twitter and want to boost followers and engagement in a hurry. Do note that Twitter ads are more expensive than their Facebook counterparts.

11. Monitor your Performance

Don’t just keep track of what and how your competitors are doing. Make sure you measure your efforts to find out what is working and what isn’t, learn from both, and keep doing better.

Key Takeaway

Twitter is one of the best platforms to market your Airbnb vacation rental online. Start with the basics of your profile, get your voice right, tweet smart and with intention, and don’t be shy to enlist the help of paid influencers or ads if you feel you need it and can afford it. Most importantly, don’t expect to generate engagement and conversion overnight. It takes a lot of effort and some time.