In the hotel industry, social media marketing is an effective way for hoteliers to communicate with potential guests, improve reservations and revenue and increase their hotel’s or property’s visibility.
For quite a while now thanks to the pandemic, do you feel that your hotel’s visibility is being affected? It must be frustrating and disappointing when you have a lot to offer but no way to convey them to your visitors.
Social media marketing can change that. In fact, it will open a lot of doors, quite literally, to your hotel.
Our web experts are providing you with everything you need to know on what social media marketing for hotels. From what it is, which platforms work best for hotels and how to leverage digital platforms to benefit your hotel by optimising social media campaigns and marketing.
Why do hotels need social media marketing?
Social media marketing in the hotel industry can be defined as the process of garnering publicity and exposure for a hotel or property using social media. That process involves a wide range of activities, from publishing or sharing photos and videos to paid social media advertising.
Social media marketing is very effective for hotels. It’s because social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are perfect for engaging old and potential guests with fresh promotional content.
Social media platforms also come with built-in analytics tools capabilities that let you track user activity and engagement. In addition, these sites usually provide beneficial hotel promotion tools such as customer reviews, ratings and the ability to invite users to events.
Now, what types of social media can be used for the hospitality industry?
Best social media platforms for hotels
There are various platforms for social media advertising available nowadays. Keeping up with the numerous options accessible to hoteliers is getting increasingly difficult. As a result, properly interacting and contributing on all major platforms at the same time would be challenging.
Therefore, when it comes to organic social media marketing, you must choose your platforms carefully. The purpose of social media in the hotel industry is to attract new guests and engage with both new and existing customers. Let’s take a look at two of the most popular social media marketing platforms for hotels.
Facebook is arguably the most popular social networking platform as it is the most accessible social media site. Facebook offers a variety of alternatives for promoting your hotel, which makes it the preferred medium for many hoteliers.
Using Facebook, you may add a range of additional tabs and cross-references to all other social networks and websites. It’s also a good way to include detailed information about your contacts, facilities and services.
Furthermore, you have a huge potential reach on Facebook. When you start using paid social advertising to target clients directly, this becomes much more apparent.
You can use Facebook to promote your hotel as part of your social media marketing strategy by doing the following:
- Create a Facebook page for your hotel’s brand and fill out the profile with complete information like a description, industry, location and contact information.
- Make sure anyone can recognise your username.
- Post pictures of your hotel’s interior decor and exterior or local picturesque areas.
- Upload short videos, stories and live videos, as well as write-ups about special offers, discounts and promotional deals.
- Persuade your guests to include check-ins or location tags in their vacation photos and videos in exchange for valuable rewards.
- Offer incentives and arrange competitions. Participate in captions about posts that promote your hotel’s brand.
- Increase your visibility and bookings by using Facebook ads.
Instagram is the second most popular social media network, second only to Facebook in terms of users. It is also best known for photo and video sharing. For sharing travel-related photos and videos, Instagram is the perfect platform.
Travellers enjoy compiling wonderfully shot photographs, adding lovely captions and utilising popular hashtags to persuade other travellers to plan their own vacations. Therefore, your hotel’s brand must be associated with this community.
You can engage with potential visitors and publish content relevant to your hotel and destination on Instagram.
Optimise your Instagram as part of social media marketing for your hotel by doing these:
- Create an Instagram business profile for your hotel and provide the necessary information.
- Post high-resolution and beautiful photos of your hotel’s ambience, activities and attractions.
- Incorporate new reels trend, for content like tourism tips, local cuisine recommendations, photos of your exterior, future events and promotional offers.
- Upload stories for Instagram. You can capture special moments, ask questions and share instant updates about your hotel’s inventory.
Now you know about the two major social media platforms and what you can do to promote your hotel. Let’s move on to some of the top tips that would help you be more mindful while advertising your brand on social media.
3 social media tips to promote your hotel
Social media marketing has numerous beneficial ways to promote your hotel.
Offer a reward in the form of coupons or discounts to attract the audiences to like and share your hotel or its page. Target your audiences based on their likes and dislikes, age, location, and other factors to advertise your hotel in your social media marketing campaign.
To establish a successful and thorough social media marketing strategy, here are three social media marketing tips for you:
1. Consider seasonality in your content
Follow the seasonality to plan your marketing strategies. Apply the seasonality factor to post based on various festive holidays and low, mid and peak business seasons.
Your content will keep changing significantly if you consider the time of the year and what you want to achieve.
Offer seasonal packages or activity-based deals on social media during the low season to boost reservations. During the high season, use social media to showcase your hotel‘s top benefits. This strategy will encourage people to book earlier, so they don’t miss out.
2. Apply brand management on your social media
Make improvements to the hotel experience based on the feedback from social media sites. Respond to social networking sites’ reviews and improve guest experiences. Whether the reviews are positive or negative, be sure to respond to all feedback to show your hotel values customer’s opinions.
Most importantly, when you receive positive feedback, make sure to share them with your followers. Positive feedback is the best type of social media promotion for a hotel.
3. Influencer marketing
Influencer marketing has given rise to many social media celebrities. You can do the same for your hotel business. Instagram travel bloggers and influencers make money through influencer marketing because of their large followings.
You can hire them to do social network advertising in your hotel in exchange for money or a nice package deal. Find the influencers in your area who can encourage your target audience to take action and contact them.
Before inviting travel influencers to stay at your hotel, make sure you have a solid plan in place. First and foremost, consider your budget. This will help you figure out what kind of influencer you can afford.
Micro-influencers may be willing to barter services, whereas macro-influencers will want large sums of money. Finally, after you’ve determined your budget, identify what you want to achieve with your well-thought-out plan.
To find out how we can help you with your Website + Marketing, using our unique location marketing platform called Top4, get in touch today at www.top4marketing.com
Looking to build customer loyalty through social media? Don’t forget to add your business to Top4.com.au
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