The start of spring means brand new stock for our Travel Store, with new lines of outdoor clothing and travel gear from many of our suppliers. It’s easy enough to put this new stock in a prominent place in our physical shop, but how do we let our online customers know that there are new products available? We can put these new items on our fortnightly mailshot, but of course that’s limited to existing subscribers.

Our shop is increasingly turning to Twitter (@talkontravel) and our blog (www.talkontravel.com) to promote new stock, as well as competitions and travel updates.

Our use of Twitter, like many companies, is still in its infancy. We are slowly building up ‘followers’ as we ‘tweet’ (send out an instant message) about new products, blog updates and, most recently, competitions.

Let’s say we want to tweet the following:

A brand new mailshot has been posted at http://shop.packyourbags.com/Mailshots/2009/pybts-April-3-2009/index.html and includes a chance for you to win a set of Surfanic Thermals!

There are plenty of ways we can improve this tweet. Firstly, we need to shorten it. At 157 characters it’s too long for Twitters 140 character limit.

Next, we can embed tracking code which allows us to monitor how successful a link is. And with URL shorteners like bit.ly, a mouthful like http://shop.packyourbags.com/Mailshots/2009/pybts-April-3-2009/index.html?utm_source=twitter-06-04-09 (notice the tracking code for Index Tools) becomes a much more manageable http://bit.ly/2YJXX.

Let’s take this one step further. When we send this tweet you have to be following @talkontravel to see it – and at the moment this is a rather narrow audience. Enter ‘hashtags’, the frequent tweeters friend. Hashtags are a way to group twitter messages together according to subject matter, similar to the concept of tagging in blogs. Head on over to search.twitter.com, search for #G20, and you’ll find a bunch of tweets about the G20 Summit. You could try #formula1 or even #britneyspears.

So if we tag, or hashtag our tweet there’s a much larger chance it’ll reach a wider audience searching through (amongst other sources) Twitter Search and Monitter. Hashtags aren’t set in stone, and you may need to search around for the most relevant ones for your tweet. This is time well spent, because you’ll be using them again and again.

#outdoorclothing seems to have no interest out there in the Twittersphere, but #travel and #competition are popular hashtags so let’s use them.

Our final Tweet might look something like this:

Our brand new #travel #newsletter includes a #competition where you can win a set of Surfanic Thermals! http://bit.ly/2YJXX

At just 106 characters we can even add in ‘Good Luck!’ and stay under the limit.

We now have a bright and tight tweet which links to our mailshot (with a link we can track) and includes three hashtags which will help expose it to a wider audience.

There are no guarantees with Twitter, but this might just grab you a few extra followers and perhaps a few extra sales too.

Happy Tweeting!

Richard Shepherd
Online Marketing Manager
PackYourBags Travel Store