Using Social Media for Global Growth - The airbnb story

AirBnB is a community marketplace for space. Anyone who has any extra space can rent it out, ahh, to people all around the world. We're are in over 182 countries, and the majority of our bookings are actually international now. Because its a marketplace, we have to be everywhere as quickly as possible. Social is invauable to us. You know, we feel that we have to generate a lot of relationships. People need to be educated on what AirBnB is. People need to know what we are offering, why we're good, why we are different. And so I think social is a great "first date" for all of that. Our community is core to our business. From the moment that people land or start their trip they're going to be tweeting. They're going to be facebooking. They're basically opening up a conversation, and we want to be part of it So with all that information coming in, ummm... We've just needed a way to manage it. It's great because HootSuite has the analytics tool which aggregates follower growth, tracking certain key words over an extended amount of time. There's facebook insights. It's all in one dashboard. We love to include all of those kind of: How many retweets? What was that social reach? From an international perspective, you need to adapt your voice for certain markets, and I think HootSuite allows a managing of that voice. We're working and liaising with quite a few different departments. We're work very closely with customer service. With, ahh, operations. We work very closely with sales and activation. As you can imagine, without something like HootSuite, umm... departments and individuals would bump into each other. Right... Someone in customer service could see something, and I've already gotten to it, and they would never know. So HootSuite has been invaluable in making sure that we're working as efficiently as possible. And making sure that we are serving the consumer the fastest and best that we can. HootSuite was a type of tool where I always wanted to kind of take with me. When I showed, ahh, the stakeholders, ahh..."hey this is the tool that I need." I needed something that was going to be, ahh.. a one stop shop. I needed something that was going to be leading towards power users, and when analytics came in, and umm, when reporting came in, I needed something that was very robust, and very easy to use, and not daunting. There's always a thought, that goes in my head, Like, oh my god! What would I do without this thing, right?!?! It's painful to imagine that, actually. We know when we have a product launch, or you've worked really hard for 5 weeks on something. And then you've got HootSuite up and all the tweets are coming in. People are sharing, and that... and then you know, you're giving high fives. And so ummm, I think that's a huge part of it too. Storys are a huge part of the content that I create. Those are the things that make you laugh, and make you cry, and make you smile. And HootSuite surfaces those stories. And that's where the gold is. So it's our job to share them. Subtitles by the Amara.org community