Smart Vacation Rental Owner Tips for Marketing with Social Media Sharing Sites

The insurgence of social networking and media sharing sites are advancing the speed and breadth by which business owners can promote their business and products. The smart vacation rental owner knows that by building even just a small but loyal “network” one is able to kick-start a web chain reaction known as “viral marketing”, a highly effective form of online message, link and video sharing.

Media Sharing Sites and “Viral Marketing”
A social sharing site member with a pre-existing network adds or rates a link or video on a given media sharing site and exposes the URL to their entire network. The term “viral” comes into play when one or more individuals of that first network share the link with their networks and so on.

Though its name is offensive sounding to some, the sharing and spreading of viral marketing is extremely valuable to a business. The key to increasing business and thus profits is frequent, intentional and purposeful sharing of information while constantly staying relevant to the business.

Sharing Frequency and Relevancy
When considering how often to post links or videos, always choose quality over quantity. Email or RSS subscribers quickly ignore – or worse, unsubscribe – from feeds which only post URLs to redundant ads of a property online.

To stay relevant to the business, provide up-to-date resources on area information, events and attractions. If you own a rental home on Cape Cod, search for “Cape Cod events” and then post links to the pages of annual festivals, fairs and celebrations in the home’s area. Search “Cape Cod fall foliage” and post links to pages with detailed fall foliage walks and hiking trails. Search “Cape Cod restaurants” and post links to well-reviewed restaurants, delis and cafés. Post the URL to the local Chamber of Commerce, the URL to any national or state parks, to the local YMCA, local grocers, local video store, etc.

Keep interest up with posts offering a variety of tidbits of information which might not have anything directly to do with a property or its area. For example, URLs to articles with tips for avoiding vacation rental fraud, blog postings about getting the most out of your vacation dollars, a well-written piece about the booming vacation rental industry, etc.

Sharing Your Online Listings
A vacation rental owner should share the URL to online property listings only when a significant update has been made to the ad, such as new photos, adding a newly scheduled local event, a new vacancy has become available, etc. or if more than two months has passed. For rental managers with multiple properties, try to keep a posting ratio of five informational URLs to every one property URL.

More Than Marketing Tools
Sites like Digg and Delicious are also excellent bookmark organizing tools which allow users to assign tags to favorite web pages for easy indexing and searching. The option to keep all or some of the bookmarks private allows a vacation rental owner to make an excellent “Resource Library” for sharing with prospective renters.

Media sharing sites like YouTube and Photobucket allow networks to share and link to video and photo messages around the world. Post and promote a business’s commercial-like video or – for more advanced users – link back to the original URL or even embed the actual video into a web page.

Families, coworkers and individuals of like interests can connect, share and exchange knowledge more easily than ever before. What else can be gained from the use of social media sharing sites?