X (Twitter) Marketing for Your Airbnb Vacation Rental

Formerly known as Twitter, X can be a powerful platform to market your Airbnb vacation rental business, allowing you to create your own distinctive brand and engage with your target audience in real-time. With around 450 million monthly active users in 2023, estimated to reach over 652 million by 2028, you will be sacrificing a significant audience and the opportunity to engage with them meaningfully by not utilizing X (Twitter) to its maximum potential.

Read on to find out exactly how you can use X (Twitter) to market your Airbnb vacation rental.

Top 10 Tips to Market your Airbnb Vacation Rental on X (Twitter)

1. Set up your account right
2. Be strategic
3. Have an authentic voice
4. Engage the audience
5. Know when to tweet
6. Get interactive
7. Use hashtags wisely
8. Use X (Twitter) Advanced Search
9. Tap into the power of influencers
10. Learn from your analytics

How does X (Twitter) work?

X (Twitter) is known as a social media platform for informing people and generating conversations. Despite a bumpy start after its acquisition by billionaire techpreneur Elon Musk in 2022 and the launch of Meta competitor Threads in July 2023, X (Twitter) continues to be a relevant platform for marketing vacation rentals.

Originally a solely text-based social media platform, X (Twitter) has however long incorporated images and video. Easy to use and free to join and utilize unless you exceed 2,400 tweets and retweets or follow over 400 accounts, per day, users can also opt to pay for a verified account that imposes no limits and provides blue (individual), gold (businesses), or grey (government-related) ticks.

Paid users can also tweet up to 10,000 characters per post though only 280 characters will be visible on the timeline with viewers having to click ‘Show more’ to read the rest.

Users can annotate each tweet with images or video content. Users can also create threads, which are a string of tweets, presenting a longer proposition via capsule thoughts.

Why use X (Twitter) to Market Your Airbnb Vacation Rental

1. For the Audience

Home to over a billion accounts, around 450 million monthly active users, and nearly 238 million monetizable daily active users of which 41.5 million are in the U.S., X (Twitter) provides a significant audience for savvy property managers and property management companies to market and grow their property management businesses.

2. To Stand Out

Because it is often overlooked by Airbnb vacation rental marketers, X (Twitter) presents your vacation rental brand with the opportunity to stand out more easily and carve out your own voice and space against bigger players before similar-sized competitors arrive or re-engage, having realized its potential and crowd out the space.

3. To Engage Audiences

X (Twitter) mostly revolves around providing information and creating conversations, so you have the opportunity to engage with users on a personal level, providing value by giving them information they need or want, opportunities that they are interested in, and dialogue that they enjoy.

4. To Create Long-term Relationships

Unlike following a brand on Facebook, users on X (Twitter) are likelier to have a more personal relationship with the brands that they follow, due to the more authentic and ‘human’ nature of X (Twitter) conversations as well as endorsements by verified celebrities and family and friends. Note however that this takes time and effort.

5. To Provide Great Service

Twitter can often act as a customer contact/service platform with users tweeting or direct messaging their queries and complaints. In fact, big Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), like Airbnb, have a separate Twitter account (@Airbnbhelp) just to handle questions from their customers including host support. You can use this to your advantage by ensuring to respond quickly and resolve your customers’ issues rapidly. Satisfied customers are likely to even praise you publicly for the level of service you provide.

6. To Reach Young Audiences

38.5% or the majority of X (Twitter)’s audience belongs to the 25-34 year old demographic. With young adults abandoning Facebook in droves and increasingly dropping Instagram for TikTok, X (Twitter) provides an easier and more engaging pipeline to the coveted demographic.

7. To Reach International Audiences

The 7th most popular social media platform worldwide, X (Twitter) provides access to over 195 million monetizable daily active users around the world. Thus, not only is it a great platform to establish your Airbnb vacation rental brand internationally but also market to international travelers.

8. To Convert Users to Customers

40% of X (Twitter) users have been shown to purchase a product after coming across it on the platform.

Once you find your voice and your authentic (brand) self on X (Twitter) and begin to engage and excite audiences, creating a loyal following, you too can convert your followers into paying customers. Tweeting out coupons and discounts exclusive to X (Twitter) can help speed up the process.

How to use X (Twitter) to Market Your Airbnb Vacation Rental

Marketing your Airbnb vacation rental effectively on X (Twitter) requires forethought, strategy, and real-time responsiveness. Your tweets need to be targeted and pack a punch if you are going to get people to pay attention to you and take action.

1. Set Up Right

Joining X (Twitter) is easy. Making sure your account represents your Airbnb vacation rental business in the best way possible takes effort.

• Pick the right X (Twitter) handle for your vacation rental brand. Usually, this would be the name of your vacation rental, but if it’s not available make it as close to your brand name as possible. Also, make sure it is not too long. People prefer shorter handles for tagging.

• Use your logo as your profile photo. Make sure it is a clean image and can be viewed even when compressed as many people utilize X (Twitter) on their smartphones.

• Use an attractive image as your header image or cover photo. This can be a fantastic picture of your property or something that showcases your offering in a creative way.

• Optimize your X (Twitter) bio. Use short words or phrases to express your brand, what it offers, and what makes it unique. Make sure it targets the audience you are hoping to attract. You can even include a shortened link to your vacation rental website.

2. Be Strategic

Do your research and find out how you can offer value to your potential audience in a way that is better than what your competition is doing or not doing at all. This could be providing information about the destination your property is located in or being an authority in relation to a unique feature of your property. For example, if your Airbnb vacation rental is a tent cabin, you can offer information, tips, and advice on all things glamping.

Your content strategy on X (Twitter) should also align with your overall social media strategy, supporting your content marketing across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.

3. Have An Authentic Voice

Having a human tone of voice is important on X (Twitter). Users will expect an authentic expression of your brand so use tone, language, and levels of emotion, humor, and formality to create your unique self on X (Twitter). For example, a historical property with a ‘Cali girl’ voice will seem fake and put audiences off. On the other hand, you could choose to temper its authentic historical voice with biting humor, which is immediately attractive.

4. Engage the Audience

Because X (Twitter) is designed to be conversational, it is a great platform to engage with users meaningfully. Pose a question. Conduct a poll. Ask for advice. Direct message users. As long as you stick to authentic expressions of your brand, you can be more personal and real without putting people off.

Don’t forget to show your audience that you value them by interacting, liking, retweeting, and following. You can even tag them when appropriate. Keep in mind that 15% of X (Twitter) users will unfollow a business within 3 weeks if they feel it isn’t making a strong effort to engage.

5. Tweet Smart

Knowing the best time to post for higher engagement with your audience can be extremely useful. X (Twitter)’s reverse chronological feed means only the most recent tweets are at the top of the feed so you need to publish when the majority of your audience is online.

According to SproutSocial, the best times to post on X (Twitter) are between 9am and 1pm, Tuesday through Thursday with Sunday being the worst day to post.

However, this is only a generalization and each audience has its distinctive habits. The best approach is to use this as a guide and delve into your X (Twitter) analytics to find out what days and times work best for your audience.

6. Get Interactive

Don’t stick to text alone. Take full advantage of X (Twitter)’s multimedia features and post images, GIFs, and video content which outperform tweets without them. Images can be photographs, infographics, or other graphics.

• Tweets with photos get 35% more engagement

• Tweets with a GIF gain 55% more engagement than those without

• Tweets with video attract 10X more engagement than those without

7. Use Hashtags Wisely

Hashtags can be found everywhere now but X (Twitter) is the original social media home of the hashtag, having been introduced to the platform back in 2007. And they still matter: The right hashtag can yield up to 12x higher engagement while tweets that include hashtags are 33% more likely to be retweeted.

Be strategically creative with your hashtags and don’t be afraid to get on the bandwagon of popular hashtags when they are trending either. Just make sure the hashtags you use in your tweets add context to your tweets and don’t overdo it. Tweets with hashtags can enjoy 21% more engagement if you restrict it to just one or two while those that use three or more hashtags experience a 17% drop in engagement.

8. Use Advanced Search

Advanced search on X (Twitter) allows you to narrow search results by specifying date phrases, people, date ranges, etc. It can be a useful tool to find users interested in your type of vacation rental offering and convert them into paying guests. Use terms relevant to your Airbnb vacation business, such as ‘luxury’, ‘corporate’, ‘budget-conscious’, etc to find people who have shown interest in propositions similar to yours. You can not only learn more about your target market but use that information to target your marketing to them more effectively.

9. Tap into Influencer Marketing

Instagram is perhaps the best-known social media platform for influencers and product placement though its effectiveness is sometimes debated. X (Twitter) on the other hand offers a more authentic and believable platform to use influencers to promote your brand. A zero-cost and highly effective way of utilizing the power of influencers is to ask your guests to tweet their reviews, tagging your handle. You can also post screenshots of the reviews you’ve received.

Another option is to reach out to influencers to review your property in exchange for a free stay. Just make sure you pick an influencer who matches your vacation rental brand and property aesthetic.

10. Harness Twitter Ads

Advertising on X (Twitter) can not only increase your reach, grow your audience, and promote your Airbnb vacation rental, but you can also use them to drive direct booking traffic and increase bookings. Twitter ads reach 10.7% of all internet users or 6.8% of the total global population. This includes 91.7 million Americans.

In fact, X (Twitter) users spend 26% more time viewing advertisements on the platform compared to other platforms.

Meanwhile, according to X (Twitter), using 3 or more ad formats increases campaign awareness by 20% and purchase intent by 7%.

X (Twitter) offers a number of advertisement formats including Promoted tweets including text, image, video, and carousels; X Amplify for premium video content; X Takeover for placement in the Timeline and Explore tabs; X Live for real-time broadcasting and engagement; Dynamic Product Ads for targeted ads; Collection Ads to showcase a collection of images and linking in a single view; and X Ad which includes polls, conversation buttons, app buttons, website buttons, branded hashtags, and branded notifications.

11. Learn from Analytics

Delve into your X (Twitter) Analytics regularly. Don’t just keep track of what and how your competitors are doing. Make sure you measure and evaluate your efforts regularly to find out what is working and what isn’t, learn from both, and keep doing better.

Don’t get lost in all the metrics either. Some metrics may give your ego a boost but won’t mean much for your business growth. Figure out which metrics provide value to your vacation rental business and track them carefully over time.

Key Takeaway

X (Twitter) is one of the best platforms to market your Airbnb vacation rental online. Start with the basics of your profile, get your voice right, tweet smart and with intention, and don’t be shy to enlist the help of paid influencers or ads if you feel you need it and can afford it. Most importantly, don’t expect to generate engagement and conversion overnight. It takes both continuous effort and time.