Whilst this post doesn't directly address issues in the online travel industry it's certainly worth mentioning, as many of us (including myself) use twitter as an easy to market way of getting information out to a wider audience incredibly quickly.An interesting report from the folk at Hitwise landed in my inbox spelling out the growing popularity of twitter in the UK.
Following the rumours of wedding bells for a Google and twitter wedding at the beginning of April, the micro blogging site has seen a 6 fold increase of traffic in the UK since the beginning of the year and a truly remarkable 32 fold increase in the last 12 months.
During the week (4/4/09) twitter entered into the top 50 websites visited in the UK, becoming the 5'th most popular website. To put this into context; twitter received more UK Internet visits in this period than the Daily Mail, RightMove, MSN UK Search, Directgov, and all retail websites - with the exception of eBay, Amazon UK, Play.com and Argos.
What impact is this recent new comer to the social networking world having, well there's a mad dash scramble by marketers to understand how they can incorporate this phenomena into their overall social networking strategy's, many pieces have been written by more knowledgeable folk than I but from first hand experience I believe many an approach is not particularly joined up, there is a traditional approach that wants to use a set of metrics e.g increase traffic, increase in conversion = increase in TTV/Revenue.
I'm not sure that these metrics are the one's we should be using in regard to social networking strategy, I am going to give this some more thought and ponder time and will share with you my conclusion in a later post.