Over the past decade, social media has had a huge impact on the way that businesses worldwide conduct their marketing efforts and in many respects has blown traditional methods out the water.

Not only is it an ideal way to interact on a more personal level with potential clients and others in the industry, it also offers valuable insights into what your customers want from your company.

So how can travel brands use the medium for market research? There are a variety of ways, but remember all of them involve a two-way conversation. Done properly this can really improve your business.

Where to start?

·        LinkedIn Groups– while these are most valuable on a B2B level, business people go on holiday too and so you can use the power of groups to begin a conversation about world travel. Perhaps strike up a conversation regarding business trips and ask people what they expect from hotels in that capacity. Use polls to determine what clients want when on their business travels, run competitions where possible that include the odd freebie from your travel affiliates. Of course, this is also an opportunity to discover how others within the travel sector use LinkedIn as a tool for their own market research.

·        Surveys – these can be carried out on either Facebook Pages or Twitter and are an invaluable way to really drill down what your customers expect from your company. Questions don’t have to be too direct, they can be general about where people like to go on holiday, good and bad experiences they have had, what makes them choose a travel agency and so on. Again, competitions are also a great way of attracting more ‘likes’ and entering into a dialogue with your fans; this is arguably the best kind of market research.

·        Use insights – These come with Facebook Pages and are great for pinning down the demographics of your fans. Where do they come from? How old are they? How engaged are they with your page? Which posts are most successful? Are you reaching your target audience? If you want your fans to be interested in holidays in the UK and are garnering likes from the rest of the world, then you can target your marketing campaign accordingly.

·        Pinterest– the rapid growth of the image driven site has given marketers a new medium to market and is perfect for the travel industry as there’s no limit to the amount of pictures of beautiful locations that you can pin. You can create a number of different ‘boards’, perhaps for different continents or types of holiday and watch who is following what. From another angle, you can use stats to see who is pinning what on Pinterest from your main website, giving you two ways to look at what is the most popular boards and locations. Again, this can really help to pin (no pun intended) down the demographics of your customers and their likes and dislikes.

Of course, these are just a few of the ways that travel brands can use social media sites to conduct market research. The most valuable will be Facebook and Pinterest but remember to link your Twitter account to both so that you gain followers from that medium too.

Whatever social networking sites you use, remember that consumers expect friendliness, openness and dialogue from your company in a way that they have never experienced with traditional, more traditional types of marketing like as email.

This guest article has been produced by Kerry Butters on behalf of the consumer advice website Broadband Genie