Why Social Media Presence Matters for Your Hotel Business

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To give their customers the best experience, hotel owners don’t just have to work on their property. They need expert marketing and administration on their side as well. For online service providers, coming up with an impactful networking and engagement campaign can accomplish that with ease.

Setting up a WordPress hotel website with a state-of-the-art booking system is a great first step. Nevertheless, none of it is useful if you cannot spread the word. The impact of social media on hotels should therefore be a strategic and dedicated undertaking.

For Hotel Businesses, The Future Lies Online

Finding the perfect hotel to stay in was once much more difficult. But with the internet, people have access to better options. And as more people head online to try their luck, hotels must compete for online recognition if they are to remain in business.

Right now, hotels need an online presence if they are to have an edge over their rivals. Apart from improving their audience reach, it provides an opportunity to explore new and elusive branding approaches.

Keeping Guests Satisfied

Social media for hotels doesn’t just help gain customers, but retain them as well. Whether you’re running a resort, health club, lodge, or any other recreational establishment, staying interactive is just as important as good advertising.

Media posting and online alerts are perfect for keeping guests in the loop about developments during their stay. But also, it gives a personal touch to their experience as well.

Moreover, it enables hotel owners to monitor feedback and run their businesses accordingly. User reviews, ratings, and impressions offer productive ways to utilize social media for hotels.

Your Guide to Using Social Media for Hotel Business

There are many ways to use social networking sites to your advantage as a business. But with social media for hotels, you need to consider approaches that work for customers, business partners, and the hotel itself. This includes standard practices as well as more imaginative uses.

Effective Outreach

Brochures and heavily-edited video ads can only do so much. With social media for hotels, you can devise an approach that is more efficient and honest.

Social media platforms are known for being a central point for targeted marketing campaigns. If you have the resources, this approach can help focus on wider targets and ensure that you are eventually seen by as many people as possible. But marketing alone is just scratching the surface.

According to WeLoveWeb, using a Facebook or Instagram account for business to send posts and share stories has other benefits too. Not only do you remain connected 24/7 and appear on the top of follower timelines, but additionally you get better interaction and social engagement.

Social media notifications and hashtag posts get better responses and all you have to do is write short messages to gain attention. Instagram even allows bigger accounts to redirect interested users from the social media page to the hotel website.

Visual Marketing

Advertising has always been key in the hotel business. But with social networks, you don’t just get to use your branding as much as you can. You can actually record, document, and photograph your property, rooms, and services. This provides patrons with a real-time picture of what you’re offering, cementing their interest.

By delivering visuals of the luxuries that customers can or are already enjoying, you are guaranteed to gain more attention and attract new regulars to your establishment.

The impact of social media on hotel visual marketing isn’t just a fantastic choice, but it can be better than website portfolios. You can create galleries through existing Instagram and Twitter settings rather than build new ones yourself.

Plus, with services like Facebook and YouTube, you can even use videos to your benefit. On top of well-crafted ad campaigns, you can employ live streaming of suites, services, and key events, or a behind-the-scenes look.

Preemptive Marketing

Most hotels are known for enjoying maximum levels of service at particular times of the year like seasonal vacations, national holidays, recreational events like festivals, periodic fishing charters, business trips, and much more.

During this time, overbooking and canceled reservations are common. This is both a nuisance for visitors and bad for business. But if the customers still have to go somewhere, your hotel needs to be there for them. So how do you make everyone happy?

Ad campaigns, as we’ve discussed, are a great way for reaching clients. But along with getting all the elements of your campaign right, you also need to focus on timing. This is where social media for hotels comes in.

By announcing the ideal window where your customers can stay, you can advertise months in advance and allow customers ample time to book beforehand.

Web Design

Quality services are identified by how well they present themselves. And on the internet, sophisticated and classy web design works even through social media for hotels.

Selecting the right theme for your webpages along drives traffic significantly upward, and hotels have quite a few choices to go around. Social media themes, when chosen well, can be equally as effective in giving customers the confidence to rely on your service.

Adding payment systems, SEO capabilities, and booking pipelines from your website to your social profiles increases your chances of getting responses from enthusiastic customers.

Remarketing

For any hotel, success lies in valuing customers and making them your biggest asset. As any pro will tell you, no ad campaign works better than a gratified client. And social media for hotel services provides a simple yet effective way to deploy this.

Posting images and videos of themselves doing activities during their stay is how hotel guests entertain themselves. If they had a wonderful time, others will too.

Marketing the experience of existing customers is a cost-effective and fantastic, tried-and-tested strategy that helps boost your standing as a business. Customer reviews, impressive ratings, and spectacular galleries are just some of the ways in which this technique can work in your favor.

Visitor Stories

Earlier we talked about how customer testimonials can help your business. That’s true, but there’s a way you can take it a step further. Platforms like Facebook or Instagram that allow users to tell stories can be useful for hotels.

People on vacations or recreational trips frequently take photos and videos. But more than that, they like to provide detailed accounts of their stay and what their experience meant to them.

As attracting attention goes, giving people an idea of what awaits them at your hotel is as great a tactic as any to make sure that you’re fully booked by the holiday season.

Commonly Used Platforms

Success through social media for hotels relies not just on effective image and PR management but on being everywhere. While there are several social networking sites to choose from, you need to go for the ones with the most promise.

But more importantly, you need to weaponize social media for marketing in various ways. Each platform has its niche in cyberspace, including message posting, media sharing, e-commerce, and much more.

As such, most hotels don’t just select a platform. They use each particular platform for a unique promotional strategy. While it’s important to cover all your bases while doing so, we’ll discuss some of the more commonly used digital networking channels that hotels use, and what for.

Facebook

As a networking site, Facebook remains one of the most frequently used avenues for businesses. While younger generations are flocking to Twitter and other platforms, Facebook still has a great number of older users. This demographic is often favored by hotels as it includes a larger chunk of the earning population.

But also, as an interactive interface, Facebook is seen as the ideal choice. With enough visitors, there are countless ways to engage with your patrons like:

• Responding to customer complaints publicly or via Messenger.
• Publishing reviews.
• Event announcements.
• Live Streaming.

Instagram

This is another popular option, as Instagram is a hub of constant media activity. But more importantly, it offers a chance at visual engagement and marketing for hotels. But there’s more.

From a business perspective, no other social media for hotels offers as many promotional opportunities as Instagram. More than 80% of its users look for and discover new services and also use them to make decisions about availing of certain goods and services.

Furthermore, marketing experts believe that Instagram is the top platform for attracting clients as well. Hotel companies can therefore use it in a number of ways like:

• Visual property presentations through portfolios and image galleries.
• Instagram Stories for added hype.
• Effective use of image captions and hashtags.

LinkedIn

It’s not just tourists that your business needs to engage. Successful hotels are known for partnering with global firms and other enterprises to improve their market ranking and image. And what better way to form such connections than through the web?

At the moment, few options are as attractive as LinkedIn, it is the go-to web service for building professional relations. With millions of active users, it is a less crowded platform than Facebook or Twitter. But that generally means that your business has a better chance of being seen.

Professional networking is much more efficient at connecting with clients. Plus, with LinkedIn, you can

• Connect with other hotel professionals and experts
• Gain investors, professional clients, and business partners via B2B leads
• Partner with service providers to improve customer experience

Google Maps

After social networking and business communication, this is something of a sharp left turn. But while Google Maps doesn’t necessarily qualify as social media, for hotels, there are quite a few ways it can be a useful service. And the reason we know this is because many of them do.

Once their hotel is visible on the map, hotel owners have a number of marketing options to work with here. For one thing, Maps designates and displays each business to nearby viewers. This means that, if someone is looking for a hotel to stay in, yours will be presented to nearby tourists as a favorable choice.

Because apart from mapping services and directions, Google Maps has developed a range of features and connective capabilities that allows social engagement. These include:

• Sharing images or videos of key locations as they appear on the map.
• Advertising rooms, services, and price options.
• Partnering with transportation apps and services as a rest stop for travelers.
• Allowing visitors to leave reviews, ratings, and comments that attract more business.

Managing Social Media for Hotels

Proper social media management requires expertise and some degree of marketing savvy. While influencers make it look easy, business owners require time to get acquainted with social media. And even if they do, they need to spend even more time managing this content in order to keep the business afloat.

As you’ve guessed, running social media for hotels can be an overwhelming undertaking. With any major service, sometimes you need to prioritize which tasks need executive attention and which should be outsourced.

Managing staff, overseeing bookings, receiving payments, and keeping in touch with business clients are just a few of the many responsibilities hoteliers already have. Adding social media management can cause business owners to divide their attention, which can affect the company quite negatively.

But from what we’ve discussed so far, it is still important for hotels to maintain an online presence if the enterprise is to stay viable and competitive. So how do you reconcile the need to engage online with the importance of concentrating on the actual business?

Outsourcing Pays Dividends

Firms and agencies specializing in digital services for businesses are the ideal investment to improve your prospects online. Along with web design and content optimization, they can also help take the burden of social media marketing off your shoulder.

While businesses themselves aren’t always familiar with social media, these third-party agencies hire seasoned experts and skilled professionals whose capabilities include:

• Account moderation.
• Audience engagement and targeting.
• Content optimization for social media.
• Marketing techniques.
• Promotional media.
• Remarketing.
• Social media advertisements.

These services might cost you, but that doesn’t mean you should underestimate them. Outsourcing social media for hotels is a cost-effective investment that will provide instant returns and drive revenue your way.

In Closing

As the market for travel and stay services become more saturated and cutthroat, business owners need to opt for more creative and far-reaching approaches.

But more importantly, they need to present themselves through effective outreach, customer care, and lively marketing.

Digital networking helps kill both birds with one stone. When done right, the impact of social media on hotels ensures an improved presence and marketing gains for service providers with minimal effort.