Social media marketing has been an integral part of every business’s digital strategy, so it’s no surprise that hotel social marketing has gained so much traction. Social media marketing for hotels is important in promoting your business, so you should definitely set up your hotel social media. Here are the five tricks to combine social media and hospitality business successfully.
1. Think about “The Look”
First and foremost, you should think about the way you want your hotel’s social media profiles to look. This is very important – in fact, it is probably as important as the look of your website. When someone visits your hotel’s social media profile, the first thing they will pay attention to is how good it looks – not the value your posts have.
For visual social media platforms, you need to settle for a certain theme. For example, Instagram and Pinterest creators often use similar editing techniques and filters or color palettes throughout their posts to give their profiles an authentic look that brings out their professionalism and uniqueness at the same time.
For other social media platforms that mostly rely on text (e.g. Facebook, Twitter), you still need to think about visuals. However, these platforms can catch the users’ attention even with their text, so you can post something on Facebook or tweet without attaching any images, GIFs, videos, or other similar media.
When deciding what “look” you want your social media profiles to have, consider the kind of brand image your hotel has. Depending on that, you will need to think of a corresponding color palette – which you are probably already using in your promo materials and on your website to an extent.
2. Don’t forget your content strategy
The next thing you should do is think about your content strategy. What exactly do you have in mind for your social media marketing? You need to have a clear idea of what you are expecting to get: how many followers you want to gain, how often do you want to interact with your customers, what kind of content you will be posting, and so on.
After determining your audience, it will be easier to understand what they are looking for. Because you are a hotel owner, you will probably want to post about your hotel and about various travel destinations specifically promoting your local community. In theory, any social media platform will be suitable for this, visual or not.
Nevertheless, you need to largely rely on your visuals but still make sure that you work on your text. You can hire professional writers for this from a writing service reviews site like Online Writers Rating which allows you to compare writers and choose the ones who are most suitable for your specific needs.
For your content strategy, try to get a set of rules for yourself to follow in order to make your content consistently high-quality. In addition to that, create a posting schedule to post regularly and at the same time of the day.
3. Grow your audience gradually
It is extremely important to understand that social media success usually doesn’t happen overnight. You will need to take time to grow your audience gradually one step at a time. Don’t rush things and don’t set your expectations too high – instead, try to be as realistic as possible when setting goals for your social media marketing strategy.
Indeed, you can have a post that unexpectedly goes viral for whatever reason, but most of the time, growing your online follower audience will take time, effort, and a lot of patience. You will need to adapt to your circumstances and adjust your strategy and the tactics you use depending on how well your content performs.
For instance, when you notice that your videos are getting traction, consider focusing on this content format and creating more videos instead of other content you are currently working on. However, keep in mind that you still need to maintain variety in the content you put out, so don’t just stick to one format doing pretty much nothing else.
You can also combine your social media marketing with other forms of digital marketing you use including email marketing, your website and blog, and so on. Doing so will allow you to increase the effect all of them have, especially if you decide to cross-promote.
4. Use customer testimonials
Customer testimonials are undoubtedly one of the most effective ways to persuade your potential clients that your hotel is a legitimate business with a good reputation and amazing offers for them to check out. Here are some things to keep in mind when curating customer testimonials and user-generated content:
- ·Respond to all the feedback you get. Even if you don’t decide to post it on your profile and it isn’t very positive, you still need to respond to it in some way to show that you value everything your existing and potential customers have.
- Don’t try to fabricate your customer testimonials. You can hire a professional writer from a writing services review site like Best Writers Online to create content for you, but this content can’t be phrased as if your customer wrote it. That being said, you can still get in touch with influencers in your niche, invite them to stay at your hotel for free, and ask them to write an honest review about your place.
- Always be polite and mindful. Even if you need to reply to someone accusing you of nasty and disgusting things, you still need to keep your cool and be professional about such a heated situation. It’s in your own interest to maintain a good reputation and show both your competitors and your audience that you are a serious hotel owner.
5. Provide customer aupport
Last but not least, social media is one of the best channels for providing customer support to your clients. It may be a little counterintuitive, especially if you have an official email address and phone number for such things, but there are many businesses already successfully using social media platforms for customer support.
For example, you can let social media users book rooms in your hotel by messaging you on one of your hotel’s social media profiles. This way, once they make the decision to book a room, they won’t lose interest by having to go to your website and search for the booking button. Instead, they will instantly message you and complete the booking at once.
At the same time, you can answer different questions your potential customers might have. For instance, someone could be curious whether or not your pool is open to every hotel guest for the entire duration of their stay. They can have the most outlandish questions regarding your hotel, but your responsibility is, once again, to answer all of them politely.
Remember that social media is a social place where people are meant to communicate with each other, so connecting with your audience in some way will be inevitable. The best thing you can do is attempt this by providing customer support.
Final thoughts
All in all, social media platforms are not as complicated as you may think they are. Once you have set up social media profiles for your hotel, you will be able to start marketing your business more effectively.
About the author
Frank Hamilton is a blogger and translator from Manchester. He is a professional writing expert in such topics as blogging, digital marketing and self-education. He also loves traveling and speaks Spanish, French, German and English.
