This is the last post of its kind where I evangelise about Twitter.
Although we joined the site almost two years ago (March 2007), it has only started becoming a really useful tool for Travolution in the last seven or eight months.
Our 'follower' numbers are close to 1,000, a jump of 600 or so in little over three months. We get more traffic from Twitter than Del.icio.us and Facebook put together.
The #phocus08 tag I started during the PhoCusWright conference in November was one of the top searched terms on Twitter on one particular day as hacks, bloggers and others all chimed with their 'Tweets'.
Anyway, Matt Parsons is collecting the list of travel companies on Twitter.
But any travel business still unsure as to whether Twitter is a channel they should be engaging with should probably take a look at this graph of Twitter's growth in the past six months (NB: traffic leap so far this month).
The point to make here is that Twitter is not only a fascinating communication tool, but it is - once again, like blogs and forums were two or three years ago - proving to be a place to find out what people are saying about a particular subject, such as your company!
I've been using Twitter for almost a year, The reason I like it so much is you easily get to meet people with common interests and engage in real time conversations with them. I've setup my blog at www.activerenter.com with the intention of learning more about the Vacation Rental business and apply it to my properties.
I must admit I'm meeting tonnes of people, learning lots and having a blast!
You can't attend the traditional networking event and get results like Twitter will
I agree I blogged on this very topic yesterday, twitter will tip very soon - companies need to buy into that, those that don't are missing a huge trick
The US travel and tourism industry is probably ahead of Europe and Asia in regards to using Twitter as a tool to monitor and participate in conversations.
Here is a list of tourism organizations that are using Twitter in the US and a chart that show the growth: http://budurl.com/ustwit
I also think that in 6 months it will be a lot harder for organizations to use twitter as a "marketing" vehicle as consumers will get tired of being followed and targeted with unrelevant messages.