Basseterre, St. Kitts – St. Kitts continues to incorporate the newest and most popular social media tools into the strategic promotion of its tourism product, most recently with the establishment of a Twitter account for tourism. Found under the username StKittsTourism, the account is a means of providing media, travel agents, tour operators and potential travelers with continued news and information about St. Kitts.
The St. Kitts Tourism Authoritys official Twitter account is regularly updated with news, information, images and articles about the destination. Accessible to Internet users globally, it features St. Kitts logo, various island images (via Twitpic) and a link to the islands official tourism website, www.stkittstourism.kn. As Twitter is considered to be a form of social media, anyone can sign up to follow St. Kitts and thereby reply directly to posts, re-tweet posts, tag posts as favorites or reference the news and information provided for their own use.
Twitter has been growing exponentially, becoming popular with consumers as well as journalists as a primary source of information in todays real-time news environment, commented Senator Ricky Skerritt, Minister of State in the Ministry of Tourism, Sports & Culture. In such a competitive market, it is important for St Kitts to utilize this affordable and effective communications tool to connect directly with our past and potential island visitors, and increase awareness for our tourism product in general.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed the users profile/blog, searchable on Twitter search, and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (called followers). Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, SMS or various external applications.
Estimates of the number of Twitter users vary, as the company does not release its number of active accounts, but generally range between 800,000 and several million. In March 2009, a Nielsen.com blog ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site in the Member Communities category for February 2009 with a growth of 1,382%.
Visit www.twitter.com and sign up to follow StKittsTourism at http://twitter.com/StKittsTourism. St. Kitts social media presence also includes the recently created Facebook fan page, entitled My St. Kitts.
