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Social media for hotels: What’s the problem?

April 05, 2012 | Hotel Marketing

In today’s marketplace, hotels cannot afford to ignore social media; but looming questions and uncertainties undermine how effectively most hotels use their social media channels. Here's a new white paper that breaks down social media for hotels into six basic steps or phases.

Some hotels don’t do social media at all, or make only a token effort (i.e., they set up the accounts … and then let them sit). These hotels are missing a powerful opportunity for:

- Branding
- Building and managing online reputation
- Serving customers better
- And last but not least, cultivating a new sales channel for direct online bookings

Some hotels do social media but use a generic approach that may work well for, say, retail businesses or personal branding, but not so much for hotels. Remember, consumers approach research and shopping for travel differently than they do for other products. The tools that hotels offer potential guests for research and booking — including social media — need to reflect that difference. Using the wrong strategy is like trying to drive a nail with a wrench; hotel-specific strategy is much more effective at turning social media platforms into growth engines.

Finally, some hotels do social media, use a decent-to-excellent hotel-specific strategy, but quickly discover that social media can be a time- and money-suck that greedily drains resources. Hotel personnel get burnt out through over-use, and executives can’t justify the resources being devoted to a channel that’s, yes, helpful but, no, not a panacea. These hotels are overshooting and failing to recognize that social media strategy needs to be:

- Basic and simple enough to be doable by hotel staff on an ongoing basis
- Moderated to avoid passing the point of diminishing returns
- Social media strategy: The solution for hotels

Evision’s “Social Media for Hotels” is an 8-page white paper that breaks down social media for hotels into six basic steps or phases. The first key here is to implement a strategy that’s tailored to the hospitality industry (thereby avoiding the second problem noted above), so that the strategy is effective at capturing users at all phases of the travel shopping process. The second key is to make the strategy actually doable, so that hotels can implement guidelines that keep social media efforts humming (avoiding the first problem) without wasting time, money, energy or effort (avoiding the final problem).

- Establish goals
- Customize your social media site
- Create unique content
- Optimize content for your goals
- Follow Through Online and Off
- Track Data and Use the Results

These basic line items are universal to anyone using social media. Our white paper delves into detail for what each step means for hotels specifically. For example, it’s especially important once we hit “create unique content” for hotels to understand they must put out certain kinds of content that will appeal to travelers at various phases in the travel shopping process.

Download the white paper "Social Media Strategy for Hotels" at Evision (PDF 2.6 MB)

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