As the debate over the hard line benefits of investing in social media continues to rage, the Quest blog is launching a series of case studies to highlight the wealth of powerful success stories from businesses who are harnessing the power of social media.

The first of our guest posts is from Roger Masterson @The_Castle_Man whose online business is a the leading provider of castle accommodation. Thanks to Twitter the business boosted sales by almost £50k in less than 6 months.

We had heard of Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin and of course this was all bundled as Social Media. We didn’t have time for this, we didn’t understand it and I thought that it was for younger people! I also questioned when would we find time to learn all this new STUFF! Let alone using it for the business.

Deep down I was hoping that this will be a fad, something else will come along to replace it. I did not even own a mobile phone, and we operate the biggest online booking service for castle experiences. I thought we could let this one go over our heads.

How wrong I was! Twitter has brought the Internet alive for me again, generated revenue, creating new revenue streams and a new aspect to our business.

The Fumbled Beginning:

Celtic Castles had created a brand within a brand to promote expertise knowledge, ‘The Castle Man’ in March 2009. This would give our customers direct contact with an expert on castles, and we linked this via a webform. We would collect the customer details and their query. SIMPLE. In the first 4 weeks this generated £34, 320 and we were happy.

We set up ‘The Castle Man’ on Twitter because we were getting such a good response through our website. Having researched competitors we thought ‘we can do better than that’ and having the tweets on our home page was an additional tool to link in new information and promote key aspects of castle experiences.

On the 8th July 2009 the first tweet was:

Golf fans, stay at Culzean Castle for the British Open, just 4 miles from Turnberry! Rooms from £250 per night http://bit.ly/166ycp

We thought that if we could build an audience with an interest in staying in castles, we can share our knowledge for free. If this audience reads the articles, some of them may book a stay, and in turn we may start to generate another revenue stream. More in our next post on how we got started and how successful we were.

Celtic Castles has been online since 1998 and now features over 90 hand picked castles throughout the UK, Ireland and France. Contact Roger on Twitter at @The_Castle_Man or visit http://www.celticcastles.com