Monterey County @seeMonterey

Twitter helps Monterey County drive tourism with user Tweets

The Challenge

Sure, California’s Monterey County is known for its aquarium and the shops on Cannery Row but perhaps less well-known are the miles of coastline along Pacific Grove, the scenic hiking and the abundance of wineries.

The Monterey County Convention & Visitors Bureau (@seeMonterey) began introducing travelers to those hidden gems through more traditional marketing channels such as email and display ads. However, as any vacationer will note, the most trusted and welcome sources of information usually come from fellow travelers. The bureau therefore wanted to spread the word about Monterey County through the voice and advocacy of those trusted sources.

The Solution

“We decided to use Twitter to spread the word about Monterey County,” says Nicole Gustas, Director of Online Marketing at the Monterey County & Conventions Bureau. “Generally, travelers and consumers alike are more receptive to messages from people they know — Twitter is the perfect solution for that because users become our advocates by tweeting and retweeting our messages to their friends and family.” To reach an engaged audience, the bureau and its agency, Borders Perrin Norrander (@bordersperrin), partnered with travel website Trazzler. “Trazzler helped us reach nearly 1.3 million of its followers by promoting several Tweets for a ‘win a free trip to Monterey’ contest in its followers’ timelines,” says Gustas. A link in the Promoted Tweets brought users to a landing page where travelers could enter the contest by following @seeMonterey and by submitting a Tweet about their favorite Monterey activities. The three most creative Tweets won.

“The format of the contest was a great way to both increase our own follower base and to have users spread our message,” explains Gustas. “The Promoted Tweets were integral in helping to drive traffic to the contest because they appeared prominently at or near the top of followers’ timelines.”

The Results

1,180 users tweeted about Monterey County and entered the contest. At the same time, @seeMonterey gained over 2,000 new followers.

“The engagement on Twitter was amazing,” says Gustas. “As a bonus, we crowd sourced some really creative Tweets — davitydave called Monterey ‘Otterly’ charming. Another bonus was the high follower retention rate on Twitter. With email marketing, once a contest is over, about 25% of our new subscribers choose to unsubscribe. On Twitter, we have a 99.6% retention rate, which is great because we can now continually update our large follower base about new things to do in Monterey County.”

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