A Guide to Using Social Media to Plan Your Next Trip
Photo by: SAITOR
The internet is no longer just about porn and ebay; new tools online (and in your pocket) can help you get inspired to travel the world, plan your trip and share your travels with everyone you know and meet along the way. While a variety of resources are available (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs,forums, groups and apps), mucking through all that internet pond scum can be a little tedious. OTP pulled all the web strings together into our Guide for Using Social Media to Plan Your trip.
No travel preparation tops the hostel-couch-moment where you’re flipping through torn guidebooks and a helpful soul pipes up with advice for your next destination. Traveling is a social activity and nothing beats sharing advice with others. If you can’t bear to leave home without a detailed plan, you can get your travel-story-swapping experience before you go using new media resources.
Using social media can get you in touch with other well-informed travelers, help you find amazing deals to relieve your wallet and awesome locals to meet up with upon arrival.
The top four platforms are Trip Advisor, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Here’s how to get past the standard uses like ex-stalking and work time-wasting:
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a destination that hasn’t been blogged about. We do our best at OTP to point you to some great places to eat, drink, adventure, explore and even do some good. Here are the travel blogs we consider top-tier and you can always hit up our favorite travel dorks for stories, tips and the chance to connect with other travelers and bloggers.
Now that we fully tooted our own horns, aside from classic travel blogging sites such as Travelpod, Travelblog and VirtualTourist, you can also find blogs hosted on Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr. Use tags to search for posts based on destination or travel-related keywords. The travel blog world is an endless maze, mostly populated with fun people bursting to share their stories. Connect with them on Facebook, Twitter or via email and suddenly you’ll have your own travel consultant who knows – because they go.
Photo by: Ed Fladung
Your college best friend Wikipedia is only one variety of collaborative websites called wikis. Use Wikitravel, a web of informational articles created by expert users who share their knowledge out of the goodness of their hearts, for all your travel-pedia needs.
If you’re the one in class with your hand always in the air (FYI- everyone hates you), you can ask away on travel forums like Frommers, Backpacker, Lonely Planet, Couchsurfing and our very own OTP 2.0. Overeager travel dorks will bend over backwards to give you passionate answers in hopes of having you, their protégé, recreate their experiences. The latest in social media are Q&A sites like Quora. Moving past the headache-inducing jumble that is Yahoo Answers, you can ask questions, answer others and follow topics of interest for up-to-date travel news.
Twitter is mecca for travelers. This microblogging site allows users to interact with each other by sending out 140-character tweets, using hashtags to discuss topics and tagging to converse with other users. Most popular travel brands have their own Twitter accounts and if there’s one thing they love, it’s interacting with customers. Try tweeting @southwestair; maybe you’ll score another pack of peanuts.
Some tips to maximize your travel experience using Twitter:
- Use a directory like WeFollow to find relevant travel-related accounts.
- Be super-organized and create a Twitter list of travel brands, bloggers and fellow travelers, or use OTP’s already carefully-curated list.
- Discuss travel using hashtags. Conversations center around keywords with a # sign in front, so use the travel-blogger-created #rtwsoon and #rtwnow hashtags to plan Round The World (rtw) trips. Try hashtagging a destination name or the word #travel.
- Use Twitter’s advanced search function to find nearby locals
- Ask for suggestions from your followers or @ reply a user you know. Recommendations about accommodation, restaurants or attractions come from real people in real time, in an ongoing conversation, all the time.
If Facebook were a country, almost the entire world would call it home. We’re guessing you’re already on Facebook and know how to use it. Now, it’s time to put a travel spin on your knowledge. Network with other travelers, plan your trip with companions and keep up with the sexy souls you meet on the road by:
- Getting Advice: Chances are you have a few Facebook friends that you don’t interact with much after that one blurry night before you parted ways for good. Here’s when you look up your old friends, frenemies and flames and find out where they’re situated– you could score a local tour guide, drinking buddy or couch. Post a status update with your travel plans and look for travel tips among the jealous comments.
- Talk to Companies: The best travel brands have Facebook Pages, so use them to keep up with deals. Hostels and bars love posting photos and creating communities on Facebook; so Friend that heavy-handed bartender, he’ll always keep you in the know. Search for tourism offices, museums, airlines, transportation companies, restaurants, hostels and bars on Facebook to find deals, recommendations and new friends in high places.
- Facebook Places: Check in to Places and Events using your Smartphone to keep track of your shenanigans and look for trending locations or nearby recommendations on Places or Foursquare, earning points as you go.
- Share with friends: Once you’re up and away, Facebook is an awesome way to keep your friends and family in the loop. Create a group page for travelers heading to a specific destination for an upcoming event and start networking before you even step on the plane. Use Facebook to share photos, check into Places and Events on your smartphone, and post status updates. Just careful not to be that douche that bombards the newsfeed, documenting every mundane step you take. Nobody cares if you saw a 3-legged pigeon in Botswana.
Once you’ve gotten all that fresh travel info, you need a way to keep the planning in check. Applications like Google Docs and Google Calendar helping you to keep track of shared itineraries, planning lists, dates and times all together in one place. Google Maps will bring some concrete navigation to your life. Use it to print out directions, search for nearby recommended restaurants and attractions to direct even the most clueless map-readers amongst you.
Snapfish, Google’s Picasa, Flickr and Facebook have digitally replaced the days of 36 mm film and swapping ‘doubles’ prints. On a smartphone, the Instagram and innovative Color apps are great for quick and easy photo sharing (with a touch of GPS-operated technostalking).
People have been bumping more than fuzzies lately. The tech answer to carrying a little notebook to write down the contact info of people you meet, using your smartphone, you can exchange numbers, addresses and emails by bumping phones.
If you’re still paper and pens, you can print up a card with all your social media URLs cheaply using Vistaprint.
Bad news for tour guides, good news for tech nerds: Smartphone applications can personalize recommendations using your exact location via GPS. Just head over to the app store on your smartphone and buy an app to help find your nearest massage parlor or late-night diner. Yelp’s been tearing it up in the U.S., but every country has their own version of user-generated review sites of just about anything and you get everyone’s tid bits with the purchase of your app. Geolocation gaming like Gowalla and SCVNGR, are designed to set you off on your own personalized treks and self-guided tours. Use Foursquare and Facebook Places to help with the drunken amnesia as long as you remember to “check-in” to wherever you are in between shots. Keep a look out for what’s “trending” on Foursquare, which can help find out where everyone else is getting down. Just be smart about where you check-in; your grandma doesn’t need to know what brothel you frequent.
OTP Tip: Make sure to buy an international data plan or an unlocked smartphone.
New mobile technology, such as push notifications and alerts, enable you to keep up with what’s happening as you adventure. Don’t be afraid to take smartphones with you on your travels – they can turn out to be a handy companion, as a guidebook, calculator, notebook, map, compass and trip diary recorder all in one. Just give your face a break from the screen once in a while to absorb your surroundings.
Written By: Dennis Pitcock and Rishe Groner
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If you use a smart phone, with a data plan, and you use google, SYNC IT UP! http://www.google.com/mobile/sync/ This will save any contact in your phone to google(along with the calender and other tools). This way if your phone gets stolen by a gypsy or an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy after a night of drinking, all those contacts are safely stored in the cloud.
Also you can encode your contact info into a QR code and put on a business card. This makes it almost as easy as bumping, and it will work across different platforms. This site works great http://zxing.appspot.com/generator/ Try to keep it as short as possible.