Cruise Buzz from Cruise Holdiays of Mission Viejo offers some suggestions on how travel agents can get up-and-running with Twitter. 

 Twitter Toolbox

• Username that is easy to remember and part of overall brand strategy.
• A headshot of the brand. Best to use your own photo.
• Followers. Use the Twitter search feature on www.twitter.com and search for your local area, things that interest you, travel, cruise lines, travel providers, travel bloggers, travel media. Don’t be shy about looking at people’s Twitter Followers and following their followers.  
• A Third-party program to help keep track of tweets. I use www.Hootsuite.com in addition to www.twitter.com.
• Create a brand specific background that has your contact information on it.

 Best Practices

• Manifest a branding mission and unique point of view (easy for travel agents). Use Twitter to layer into that overall mission and send your followers to photos or website landing pages with additional information.
• Link sharing is the most unique component on Twitter. Twitter is a micro blogging site which should be part of an overall marketing strategy that includes a blog with relative content, and a call to action.
• Keep your tweets professional and about your business. Get a separate account to follow Ellen and Ashton Kucher.
• Follower maintenance. Go into your Follower list and block unwanted people, places and “things.”  Don’t assume that all is “clean” on Twitter.
• Have a brand yet still have an authentic two-way conversation with people on Twitter.
• Don’t push content and links. Make sure to balance out your tweets so that the experience has a human element. 
• Don’t just push your brand.
• Don’t be over the top.

 Time Savers

• RT: Short for re-tweet. A command that will let you copy a tweet and the @user into a new tweet. Command available from third party Twitter programs like Hootsuite.
• Block: The command that “blocks” unwanted follower from following you and posting @replies to you.

 Glossary of Must Know Twitter Terms

• Hashtag: The # (called a Hash symbol) that precedes a word. The hashtag is a favorite tool of conferences and event organizers to keep track of posts relating to their brands.  But individual Twitter users also use hashtags to organize themselves. Think of a bulletin board with sticky notes on it. The hashtag is a way for people to organize themselves into categories like sections of a bulliten board.

Common hashtags  #FollowFriday (or #FF for short) and #TravelTuesday (or #TT for short) are popular ways to make suggestions on people to follow.

You can use the Twitter search feature to look up the hashtag of interest and see numerous posts about the same topic. For example: #cruise will show you all posts that have the word cruise in it.

• Twitter List –A feature on www.twitter.com that allows users to create custom lists of followers.  The more lists you are on the better. Users can create their own lists or  they can follow other lists.

Useful Reference:  Mashable. http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/