Experimenting with Twitter

This week I spent some time exploring and getting to know Twitter. It is a great way to receive news quickly and keep up to date with topics, businesses or people that interest you. On Twitter, each user creates a profile, and then follows other profiles so that they can see these people's tweets on their timeline. One tool that was originally unique to Twitter was the hashtag. A hashtag is created by placing the '#' symbol in front of a word or phrase to turn it into a link that groups all of the other tweets with the same hashtag.

I set up my own profile and started to search for similar travel accounts to follow. I found that when I searched through the #travel hashtag, I did find a lot of tweets about my topic of interest, but not necessarily from accounts based solely on travel. To find accounts purely about travel I searched the keyword 'travel' and found what I was looking for this way.

The hashtag #traveltips turned out to be a great source of information for finding articles about what to do and what not to do whilst traveling. Also searching the hashtag of a place like #Canada or #NewZealand offered a lot of specific travel content.

However, I did find that the best way to find quality content to re-tweet was to follow well known travel accounts. These accounts don't normally hashtag anything but rely on the fact that they have already established themselves as a brand. Because my blog and account is not well known at all, I do have to use hashtags like #travel, #traveltips and #traveladvice to get my tweets noticed by users.

As well as retweets, I composed several of my own tweets that linked to posts on my blog and interesting travel articles I had found on other blogs. Because of the 140 character limit, and short attention span of readers when they are bombarded with so many tweets, I kept my tweets short and sweet. I also did a bit of research on hashtags before I used them. For example, when tweeting about my blog post about the European refugee crisis, I found most tweets used the hashtag #RefugeeCrisis rather than #EuropeanRefugeeCrisis, again probably because of the character limit.

Unfortunately I did not receive any re-tweets or mentions from other users. I did however gain a few loyal followers that have now been following me since I started my blog. I found that I receive the most followers from people following me back when I followed them. I also gained followers when I used the hashtag #travel because obviously that is a very popular hashtag monitored by lots of people.

I am still finding out the unwritten rules of twitter, and I hope that with trail and error I can build up my following on this platform.

My tweets:

My re-tweets:

New York at Christmas

This year I will be traveling to New York with my family over Christmas. I'm very excited, because I love Christmas, travel and spending time with my family. I've been doing some research about what to do while I am there, but I wanted to hear suggestions from locals and have some of my questions answered. I decided that Trip Advisor was the best platform to do this on, as it has a section dedicated to travel questions. I posted a question in the 'New York' forum asking a few questions about the city at Christmas time. So far I have received 9 responses from locals living in New York, which is more responses than I hoped to get. Some of the responses were very helpful and informative, but others were unnecessarily ill-mannered.

If you have anything to contribute, I would love to have you participate in my forum. Or if you want to pose your own question to locals and seasoned travellers, head to the Trip Advisor travel forums. It has proven to be a great source of information.

Travel is a privilege

Europe is facing a refugee crisis, and they have been for a very long time. Refugees come out of conflict as people must leave their home country or face unthinkable circumstances. Currently there is a lot of conflict near the boarders of Europe in countries like Ukraine, the Middle East, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2014 662,000 people applied for asylum in Europe. Already this number is tracking higher in 2015, with most of these people coming from Syria. 

Unlike Australia, Europe is not an island. It's much easier to travel to, and much harder to monitor its borders. Asylum seekers come mostly across the borders of Austria, Turkey or Hungary. They are then processed in the first European country they set foot in and are resettled in countries willing to take them. Between them, Germany and Sweden take in around half of refugees and France, Italy, Switzerland and Britain resettle the rest. Other countries, like Australia, also take thousands of refugees from camps on Syria's borders each year. Europe has currently reached a state of crisis because of the amount of refugees that need to be processed and resettled. When hundreds of thousands of people cross country borders, this is hard from the aspect of civilly processing them all. Countries that then resettle them face issues of housing. Luckily most countries do have a pro-active approach to asylum seekers and are desperately searching for a way to resettle these people who are in much need of place where they are safe. 

As a reader of a travel blog, you might be thinking, what does the European refugee crisis have to do with me? It is incredibly devastating, but I'm not sure how it relates to travel. Even though it may not seem like it, one of the core problems of this crisis is travel. Asylum seekers need to leave their home country, or most likely be killed or tortured. They have no choice but to travel to a foreign country. They would not be claiming asylum unless they had no where else to go. Because most people in first world countries have not experienced this, I don't think we realise how we take advantage of being able to travel freely. If I wanted to, in this moment I could go online and purchase a ticket to another country. I could even go down to the airport and jump in the next free seat, if I was so desperate to travel. This ability is an incredible luxury. These asylum seekers must use illegal means to get out of their country because people in authority are trying to prevent them from leaving. 

What does this mean for people traveling to Europe? I searched intently for an answer to this question, but I could not find one. I suppose this is a good sign, that people are not concerned with their own needs for travel, but actually dealing with the crisis. However, I will offer my own response. Traveling across borders in Europe for tourists may take a little longer because of increased safety precautions, but it most probably won't be affected. The biggest issues are in the countries bordering Europe, so it is most definitely unwise to visit these areas. Smartraveller.gov.au does advise travellers to exercise high caution when traveling to Turkey, as this country borders with Syria where there is a lot of terrorism. 

I hope this post has been informative, and does make you think about how the ability to travel freely is a privilege.

This post was based on an article from The Sydney Morning Herald.