Using Social Media For Travel & Tourism Marketing

During the past several months Social Media is one of the search term which is searched very high on the major search engines. This raises the question that whether social media has become an independent media and whether it has grown as an Industry in itself.

It is a fact that the social media has gone extremely big world over and its reach is getting bigger and bigger. Today i am talking about whether the advantages of social media can be utilised in promoting tourism and travel related services. In the recent times one of the most affected industry due to the current economic recession is the online travel industry. In order to revive this industry from the hard times new paths are opened by the social media. There is hardly anyone in the world those who have registered with at least one social media website. If a person who know how to access industry and not aware of social media then he will be living under a rock in the internet world.

As per the information from the travel industry both online and offline travel players were having a hard time converting any business this summer. Most of the major online travel portals facing hard times and seen fall in coversions from 12% to 7%. The current economic recession has affected not only domestic travel but also a steep fall in number of international travelers.

How social media can help in overcoming this bad situation in the travel industry? As per experts in the internet social media can help in overcoming this situation.

It is a fact that social media marketing is helping online players for more conversions for travel players globally. The reports from the social media industry that the industry is bright and it help in reaching more people who are interested in a particular service. The graph of people using social media websites like orkut, facebook, twitter, hi5 etc are on the high. This global trend can be applied to india where social media is extremely big with over 12 million orkut users and with twitter meets happening often and where facebook can be used to attract people to a particular campaign. This trend suggests that it is time for the major travel players to turn to social media marketing and get more conversions.

google adsense video units retiring

The Google Adsense has announced that Google will stop pursuing the Google Video units. Google Video units was started in the month of October 2007 but due to not living up to the expectations what Google has expected for, Google is going to “discontinue” the feature by the end of April, 2009. During by end of this month you should remove you Adsense video ad units from your web pages. With this Adsense video ad units feature, publishers were allowed to display YouTube content and ads on pages for a share of the revenue.

This decision was taken by Google after Google Adsense publishers were recently dissatisfied with the performance of Google Adsense video ad units, with respect to earnings generated by these Adsense units. Now a days Google is not allowing any new sign ups for video ad units, and in the end of April,2009 it will be completely discontinued. In an announcement by Google it has recommended that all publisher who are displaying video ad units in their web pages start removing the ad units.

In the announcement regarding retiring of Adsense video units Google has added that this change will not be affecting the availability of other video-related ads options. Video ads may are supposed to appear in your AdSense for content ad units if one has opted to display image ads.

After the discontinuation of Adsense video units by the end of April, any remaining Leader board or Skyscraper video units on your pages will direct users to YouTube.com, while other type of video units will automatically be changed to standard embedded YouTube players. The other types of video Adsense units will be displaying top YouTube videos, but unfortunately those units will not be generating any earning. So start replacing you video ad units at the earliest with other content.