Social Media Tips

These social media tips can help you reach out to your online network of Facebook Friends, fellow photo buffs and the Twitterverse at large to find a great vacation rental.

Here's my take on an area that’s evolving -- and beginning to offer some interesting ways to expand your search.

Upsides: The media likes to wonder if Twitter is changing the way people plan trips. “Just tweet your request" and get real-time advice and recommendations from other Twitter-users (who call themselves “tweeps”) with feet-on-the-ground expertise or geographical knowledge of your destination. And it could happen. It probably has.

Downsides: The reality is, searching via Twitter is still the definition of hit or miss. Your result is contingent on who happens to be out there within moments of when your tweet appears, and, even more important, who’s listening.

Most people are busy promoting their own message. If you do get a 140-character response some one, it’s likely to be a link to his or her website. And, once again, you’re on your own to vet the source.

If you do a keyword search “California vacation rentals,” you get real-time results. Real-time is interesting if you’re following a breaking news story. If you’re searching for a great vacation rental, the results tend to be more of a grab bag: unrelated mentions of your keywords. Often there's a scatter-shot of self-promotion posts from one Twitter user can feel an awful lot like spam.

Twitter’s advanced search function lets you add all kinds of parameters -- even a hash tag (#)designating a category, like “#vacation rentals”. But when I plugged in the keywords “California beach vacation rentals” and "#vacation rentals" for the first half of August I came up with nada. (Which I’m still scratching my head about.)

Bottom line: I love Twitter -- just not for trip-planning. My advice is to stick with Google. Google and other search engines use complex algorithms that are finely tuned to locate content ranked by substance and relevance. I’m not wasting much time on Twitter until the search functionality gets a whole lot better.

Through Facebook, the concept of “six degrees of separation” -- the idea that any of us could connect with anyone on the planet using a thread of personal connections that begins with one friend -- takes on a new fascination.

Upsides: Facebook is a network built on trust and transparency. Your Facebook Friends have profiles and e-mail addresses. Facebook Friends like interacting. And, no surprise: some of them have cool vacation homes you could rent.

“If you’ve got 200 Facebook Friends, you probably know 10 people who have vacation homes,” says Brent Hieggelke, president of Second Porch. You may not know it, because it’s not something that comes up in casual conversation. Second Porch is a Facebook app that gives you easy access to Friends with vacation homes to rent.

The beauty of searching for vacation rental homes using Second Porch is that each listing is attached to a real person, “the face behind the place,” says Hieggelke. You can click on the owner’s profile, send questions via e-mail and check out recommendations posted by people who’ve already stayed there.

And if you’re not ready to rent, click on “follow” to save the home on a personal My Second Porch page for future reference.

If you’ve never rented a vacation home and are troubled by nightmare stories and scams played up in the mainstream media -- which are counter to a recent study by PhoCusWright, a research authority in the travel industry, that reported only one percent of renters came home unhappy -- Second Porch is a great place to get your feet wet.

Downsides: Like any recent launch Second Porch, has a long way to grow in terms of inventory. And it’s still in its Beta version, so you might run into some rough patches. The staff is very responsive.

Bottom line: Choosing a vacation rental by building a trusted relationship with the owner first is a powerful concept. You can have a great vacation and a new Friend.

What are those scary shadows hiding? Is that a view from the house or down the street? What decade was that photo taken in?

Enter: cool photo and video sharing websites like Flickr.

Upsides: These sites are cool, because they give owners the tools to improve their photos, organize them and and share them with you.

Beach house reviews on Beach Vacation Rental Scout are linked to individual photo “tours” on Flickr. Here's a small sample from of my collection of my Favorite Beach Houses and Favorite Beach Towns in California. (Hint: Click on the slide show button, sit back and enjoy.)

If you’re looking for a rental on Flickr, you can tap in topic words (tags) to search for photos of beach destinations and groups of homeowners. VRBO has a group, for example.

While not a social media company, per se, there's a new video sharing resource called Vacation Rental Video Clips or VRclips.com focuses exclusively on vacation rental property videos -- with more than 1,000 previewed videos and slide shows of rentals in throughout the U.S. ad in Mexico and the Caribbean.

Downsides: Many Flickr groups organized around vacation rentals tend to be small and relatively inactive. And video clips range from exceptional to weird fish-eye views and speedy pans that can give you vertigo.

Bottom line: Definitely worth an hour or two -- and maybe a bag of popcorn. I’m with Chris Barry of VRClips, who says, “We certainly can't compete with the big vacation rental websites, some with over 100,000 properties in their databases, but we definitely think ours is the most fun!”
To be continued...

Of course! So, as social media continues to evolve, so will these social media tips.

I look forward to learning more from my own experiences. And I hope you'll send me your own social media tips if you're searching for vacation rentals on sites like Facebook, Twitter and VRclips.

Use the form below to share you specific social media tips.

Back to the top of Social Media Tips