Reach.ly Connects Hotels With Travellers Through Twitter
Customers today have an increasing number of ways to interact with brands or physical venues. They can participate in online communities in social media, voice their feedback on Twitter, check-in almost anywhere and benefit from discounted coupons. There is also a growing number of companies that help traditional industries and physical venues interact with their customers. The latest example from this region is Reach.ly, a Latvian start-up that has just launched a service for hotels to reach out to potential customers through Twitter. Their idea is fairly simple: tweets about travel are one of the top themes on Twitter; by capturing specific tweets that feature a town of destination and delivering them in a real-time stream to hotels Reach.ly help hotel administration easily reach out to prospective customers.
Using the service seems very straight-forward: hotels need to log in with their Twitter credentials, which the service would verify, and upon registration they'd land on a dashbord of tweets that feature towns or countries where the hotel operates. The hotel stuff can then respond to those tweets with offers from their hotels or additional information about the city to attract customers.
This kind of direct communication seems to be quite effective in terms of customer acquisition as well as brand management. As Ernests Stals, co-founder and CEO, explains: 'Our test results show that 9% of guests receiving a message actually make a booking! About 20% more respond that they appreciate the direct communication.'
As simple as the idea sounds, Reach.ly use complex mining and semantic algorithms to analyse the Twitter stream and extract most relevant tweets. The company points out that their software is suitable for other social media websites and can be utilized in various other markets that are looking into direct marketing opportunities using social media. Thus, hotel industry is just the beginning for Reach.ly.
Reach.ly was founded by Ernests Stals, Kaspars Kalniss and Andris Berzins. Andris is also acting as an angel investor to get the company initial funding. The sum of the investment was not disclosed, nor was it stated whether other investors particiapted in this round or not.
Image by Renato Pequito
Great concept. I wonder what their revenue model is. Anyone?
Hello Andre,
I'm Ernest from reach.ly . Right now we are researching different revenue models. Most obvious one is subscription based. At this stage we want to explore other ways we can add value to our customers.