If Travelers Are Your Target, Reach Them Before They Get To Town

There’s a new, free tool that enables marketers to identify potential customers who are planning to visit their cities, and to connect with them before their trips.  Reach.ly (http://reach.ly/) was developed for use by the hotel industry to contact potential guests, but no reason it can’t also be helpful in marketing by restaurants, emergency health care services, tour operators and others.

To use it, just set-up a Twitter account in the name of the business that serves travelers, and run the Reach.ly program to identify people who have tweeted abut their plans to visit the city or cities in which you do business.  Then use the Reach.ly dashboard to start a conversation with a traveler.  To help keep things organized if you’re connecting with dozens of people, Reach.ly will track the conversations automatically.

The difference between using Reach.ly and the main Twitter search engine is that the results are arguably more precise because of a semantic search algorithm employed by Reach.ly to focus on people with travel plans rather than just those mentioning your city.  The tool is currently free, but no guarantees for the future.