Why use Twitter?

There's been a lot of discussion recently about whether online travel agents should participate in social media. The debate initiated with the creation of the lastminute.com Twitter feed. The key question that lay behind the debate that ensued was, "what does lastminute.com hope to achieve by being online?"

The simple answer is that we want to provide our customers with a new way of communicating with us and new ways of receiving our content. Our customers are web-users; people with blogs, twitter feeds, Flickr profiles and YouTube channels. We're trying to make sure that information to help people decide where to go on holiday, when to book and what to do when they arrive is available on the places where they like to congregate online. To this end we've created a Twitter feed which we'll use to provide our news and participate in online discussions.

Another online initiative is our Social Media Press Office, which is an aggregator of all lastminute.com online content including videos, public photos, news as well as opinions on news topics and stuff going on at lastminute.com HQ. We hope that the site will become a resource for bloggers and journalists, providing the tools to research and write interesting posts. If you need any information about lastminute.com then this should become a first point of call.

We want this to be more than a library of releases, news clippings and adverts, however, and we'd really appreciate your feedback on how we can make this a more appealing and interesting site. We promise never to spam anyone with unsolicited updates or news - if we follow you or comment on your blog it's because we think you're interesting, we won't be hurt if you don't reciprocate.

Thanks,

The lastminute.com team