Exclusive ITB Feature: Social media is becoming increasingly important for promoting tourist destinations; that a hotel has a profile on facebook or a destination on tripadvisor is present and well rated is not sufficient anymore.

For the eTourism expert Stefan Niemeyer a successful social media strategy not alone deals with the choice between Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. Social media rather form platforms on which trust is created.

If you thanks to social media find out that a friend does appreciate a specific hotel, it is more likely that you book this instead of another you find less "personal" information or cannot find any at all.

Thus, the question arises: "How can we use social media intelligently, so that the guest finds trust? That he wants to experience it?", Niemeyer reasoned during his keynote "Social Media Redloaded" on ITB 2014. In the following he pointed out that "trust is the currency, to be noticed in travel planning."

Before answering these questions himself a little later, Niemeyer mentioned a set of figures. The trip planning is always intuitive. 24 days is actively searched for a destination, passively 85 days yet.

Read the full story HERE, only at 4Hoteliers.com