Twitter for tourism: Scarborough case study

In order to keep up to date with the fast changing social media space, I spend a fair amount of time here at Wolfstar researching social media best practice and exciting new developments in this space. This helps the team to inform the strategy and tactics that we suggest for clients.

If you’ve read my profile on the Wolfstar website or follow me on Twitter, then you’ll know that even though I now live in Leeds, I’m still proud of the fact that I grew up in Scarborough. So, it’s not surprising that I follow @Scarborough_UK on Twitter, which seems to be the most popular and well used Twitter stream relating to the great little town.

The Twitter stream has 592 followers and actively engages in meaningful conversation with a large number of them on a daily basis. Therefore, in order to get a better understanding of how organisations within the tourism industry utilise Twitter, I contacted the people behind @Scarborough_UK.

I found that Mark Pickering, the manager of the marketing department for English Rose Hotels, was behind the Twitter stream and it was started as an “experiment” to see if a presence in this space would be well received by the social media community.

Mark explained that the biggest problem in entering this space is that some brands and organisations seem better suited than others:

“After a little research, it became apparent to me that, unless you are a huge established brand, you are always going to have an up hill struggle to make social media work for you.  Don’t get me wrong, some ‘small companies’ have had great success, but they tend to be ‘cool’ companies to start with and their demographics match social media perfectly – ours unfortunately don’t.”

This led the team to wonder how they could use Twitter without getting lost in the ether of little known brands. And, the solution? Scarborough:

“So we needed a bigger brand, but one that was still relevant to us – and what better than Scarborough?”

This idea worked well, many people have embraced the @Scarborough_UK Twitter stream as the official voice of the town, consulting it for the latest news and events as well as asking questions relating to the area. In turn, @Scarborough_UK can engage with users in order to build a sense of community and a social media presence for English Rose Hotels.

I’m sure that we’ll start to see other organisations within the tourist industry using Twitter in this way, utilising a well known area to enter the social media space.

*NB this post has been amended for data protection reasons.