Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
There are several applications (and misapplications) of social media marketing in the hotel and hospitality industry. Today, I want to talk about 2 easy-to-use social networks that almost any hotel can use to increase exposure and engage potential and past customers. While no cookie-cutter application of social media marketing will work for every hotel, I hope to cover 2 general applications that any hotel can try on their own.
Hotel Twitter Marketing
Twitter is perhaps the most blogged about social network and Twitter marketing is a hot topic that has been hyped-up by bloggers and media alike. While business in many industries have already tried or plan to try their luck at twitter marketing, I think that this channel makes more sense for hotels than it does most others. As a hotel, here are just a few easy ways you can get your message out there on Twitter. After creating a twitter page for your hotel, consider the following ideas for marketing your hotel on Twitter:
- Offers – Tweet about any and every special offer that you’re promoting through other channels. You’re followers are most-likely following you because they enjoyed their stay at your hotel and plan to come back. Give them a good reason to.
- Hotel events – Throwing a big New Year’s party? Hosting a conference, art show or other interesting event? Letting your fans know through Twitter can be a great way to generate bookings and daily visitors to your hotel. Tweet a brief event description and link to a page where your fans can get more details.
- Local Events – Tweeting about upcoming local festivals, concerts and other events in your area can help generate travel interest in your followers. Timing a strong promotion with an interesting local event can be a great way to encourage bookings.
- Past events – Using twitter to share photos and video of exciting events at your hotel can be a great way to update fans on exciting things that have happened at your hotel. Simply post your photos or video on your website or other social networks like YouTube or TwitPic and tweet a link to your followers.
- Daily specials – If you hotel is home to one or more bars or restaurants that aim to attract the local crowd, tweet your lunch and drink specials (include photos!) daily.
- Customer service – Encourage past, present and future guest to contact you though Twitter for assistance. When using Twitter for customer service, be prepared as customers will give honest feedback. It’s best to be open and responsive with any direct communications that you receive.
Marketing Hotels on Facebook
Consider your Facebook fan page as your hotel’s home away from home. On Facebook, creating a fan page gives you an opportunity to present your hotel to the community. Start a fan page and build it up with information about your hotel including photos, video and links to your website. Then, update the page on a regular basis with a lot of similar content that would on Twitter. Here are a few ideas for marketing hotels on Facebook:
- Offers – Post any special offers to your wall
- Upcoming events – Create an event through your fan page and update your fans
- Past events – Post any interesting photos or videos from past events to your page for fans to see
- Fans – Encourage your fans to post photos and reviews about your hotel. More fan interactions will make your efforts much more worthwhile
These are just a few ideas to think about when trying to engage your customers and future customers on social networks. Here are a few examples of hotels that seem to be doing a pretty good job with hotel social media marketing.
Hotels on Twitter
- The Iron Horse Hotel – The Iron Horse seems to do a good job with updating locals and distance travelers alike with interesting hotel activities.
- Ivy Hotel – The Ivy Hotel does a great job with keeping local followers up-to-date with weekly events for their club, Envy.
- The Charles Hotel – Another good example of an active hotel promoting to past and future customers, travel agents and bloggers.
Hotels on Facebook
- Loews Hotels -Loews does a good job updating fans with promotions from many of their different hotel locations.
Additionally, fans seem to be fairly active with posting comments on the Wall. - Opus Hotel – Good job keeping content up-to-date and great job with media (videos and photos). I noticed that there wasn’t too much fan interaction on the wall but they still show quite a few fan-submitted photos.
With so many people having facebook accounts, and facebook’s user base significantly growing as well as twitter rejecting facebook’s offers to buy them, it was only a matter of time before facebook decided to implement the ‘@’ feature in some form or fashion.
Today facebook launched the @mention feature which takes the basic principle of twitter’s @username piece and implemented it on facebook. Now you can @your-friends-name and have your post/status/ect post on your friends wall as well. In addition to being able to @-tag your friends, you can also do the same to groups, fan pages, etc.
Let’s try an example shall we:
@mention facebook feature
So what does this mean for us?
Well, first lets think about this new facebook feature as an extension of the already popular “tag” function. From images to videos to now basic posts and status updates, this will allow you to offer a more social connection to your posts. Instead of saying “I went to lunch with the people at THAT Agency”, now you can do something like “I went to lunch with my brother @thatagency today” * The @thatagency would be replaced with the link to the company’s account. The update will post on both yours and “joe’s” walls.
Call is saving some time.
I have to admit, I really don’t go around reading who said what on the main wall when I log in, but it would be of some value to be able to quickly see any mention of me on my own profile. Which you would probably already know about since you will get a notification of this action.
Pros:
- Could be used for tracking information later on.
- Posts about you, your company etc, that were missed could quickly be seen and response with customers, friends and such would be faster.
Cons:
- Maybe the other person does not want to be mentioned.
- The world is losing its privacy.
- I can just write on the other persons wall.
Do you have any more pros or cons? let us know.
Social media trends indicate that online marketing is set to undergo a dramatic makeover. Businesses are increasingly integrating social networking websites into their marketing strategy. A recent study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (a representative body of American marketers) revealed that 26% of marketers found trends in social media taking it towards further growth.
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Tags: social media marketing, trends
The distinction between our physical and virtual lives continues to blur at an amazing pace, as reflected in the social media statistics for 2009. While analyzing statistics, however, it is important to remember that numbers by themselves are meaningless. They become meaningful when these numbers are used to delineate trends. Most statistics show that 2009 is the year for social media. People are using sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked In more and more as their first option to connect with the world around them.
According to the social media marketing statistics for 2009 analyzed by Neilsen Online, social networks and blogs beat other online activity, including personal email, to become the 4th most popular online activity. While 67% of the global online population visit member communities, the time spent on social media sites now accounts for almost 10% of all internet time (Nielson Online, March 2009).
Let us look at the social media statistics for 2009 for some of the most popular social networking sites to further understand the emerging trends:
- MySpace continues to be the most popular social media site in the US, capturing 31.95% of all social media visitors. Globally, however, MySpace has fallen behind Facebook as the leading social media site, with Facebook recording 65.7 million unique visitors in 2009, as compared to 54.1 million at MySpace.
- Twitter has seen staggering acceptance from the global Internet population, growing by 76.8% from February to March and a whopping yearly growth rate of 1,382%, from February 2008 to February 2009.
- Facebook grew 314% in Europe in terms of yearly traffic from February 2008 to February 2009.
- According to the February 2009 statistics released by Clean Cut Media, YouTuve us the #1 video site on the web, with 300 million visitors each month.
- According to Compete, Digg saw a 91% increase in traffic, while Stumbleupon and FriendFeed recorded a huge increase of over 180% and 3100%, respectively, as compared to 2008.
- On the other hand, HotorNot.com, Technorati and Bloglines recorded a decline of 67%. 35% and 21%, respectively in unique visitors, as compared to 2008.
Although all these figures appear staggering, no single metric can really give a true picture of what trends one should expect through the rest of the year and into 2010. For a clearer picture, one needs to analyze various aspects, such as the retention rate, time spent on the site, what the users actually do on the site, etc. to get the true picture of the social media marketing statistics.
Tags: social media marketing statistics, social media statistics
It is no secret that the online world can change dramatically in a matter of months. It is up to you to keep your ear to the ground so you can pick up all of the latest trends and know what is hot before it becomes old hat. One of the best ways to accomplish this task is to keep an eye on social networking statistics.
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It truly boggles the mind to think about how complex our online world has become in just a few short years. A brand, as recent examples with Kentucky Fried Chicken and Motrin prove, can suddenly be flooded with negative publicity and feedback all due to the giant sounding board that is the Internet.
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Tags: reputation management
Posted on Jun 15, 2009 by William to Social Media
There can be no doubt that social networking media has changed the way people use the Internet, both professionally and for fun. With the implementation of Facebook usernames, though, how will people go about finding others now?
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Trends in the online travel industry have been changing rapidly since 2001, with the Internet playing an increasing role in the growth of several industries. The popularity of the Internet has been spearheaded by the fast evolving social media trends.
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Tags: online travel industry, social media trends, trends in social media
If you administrate or belong to a fan page on Facebook, you may have noticed a new layout sometime in the past couple of weeks. As part of Facebook’s new website design which started back in September 2008, Facebook finally rolled out the new fan page design. The new fan page design comes with new functionality that may have a pretty cool impact on the network as a whole. Facebook recently released an overview of the changes to come.
New Design
The new design makes fan pages look a lot more like typical profile pages. Fan pages now have display multiple tabs for video, photos, info and other applications. Additionally, fan pages have been redesigned so that the news stream is the focus of the page, as is also the case with profile pages. Overall, the new design seems to make it easier to organize information on fan pages and also puts an emphasis on fan updates and user comments.
New Functionality
According to Facebook, the way that fan pages interact with the rest of the network will also change in the near future. Eventually, fan pages will interact with the network more like the way individual profile pages do. For example, each time a fan page administrator adds a photo, shares a link, comments or posts an update to the fan page, that update could potentially stream to the news feeds of all its fans.
From the standpoint of a fan page administrator, this can be a great thing as more exposure will be given to the fan pages. In the past, marketing a fan page was a bit more difficult because fan page activities did not stream into news feeds the same way that profile activities did. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the rest of the network with regard to fan page growth and users willingness to become fans.
Sample Fan Page:
Click to enlarge
Tags: facebook
Posted on Feb 24, 2009 by Rick to Social Media
Wow, just writing this headline makes me feel like I’m selling some scummy ‘get rich quick’ product. Don’t worry, I’m not. Don’t have 140 million customers yet? That’s okay too. This will probably work even if you only have a few customers.
Inspired by a recent Facebook calamity, I though I’d talk about one of the fundamentals of social media marketing.
First, about the calamity: Facebook recently made an update to their Terms of Service (the little link at the bottom of the page that no one ever read, until now). To summarize, the change indicated that Facebook could now use information and content uploaded to the site for as long as they wanted to. Previously, this section stated that, upon canceling an account, users’ personal information and content would be removed. A swift and fierce backlash across the social web forced Facebook to quickly revert back to the old Terms of Service while they reconsidered this move.
From a social marketing perspective, it’s important to pay attention to what has happened here. First, Facebook made a change to a policy that almost no one pays attention to. Next, a detail-oriented blogger drew attention to the change causing word spread quickly and uncontrollably across the web. Outrage on the social Web forced Facebook to almost immediately reconsider the change in order to prevent ill-will towards their network. A simple post, which took all of 30 minutes to write, announced Facebook’s decision helped them to regain much of the confidence of their customers.
At this point in time, the social Web has responded well to the quick response on the part of Facebook to reconsider. While some damage has been done, it’s nothing compared to the alternative where users on a large scale could have potentially moved on to another network offering more privacy. Companies like Facebook clearly understand that the power of the social web and yield to its demands. Do you?
All companies are subject to the same elements that effect social networks just like Facebook is. Consumers are commenting, rating, blogging and discussing purchase decisions long before making them. The worst thing a company can do is to not be involved in the communities where its potential customers are active.
Most importantly, ignoring negative feedback on the Web can destroy a company or brand’s reputation. It’s not enough to ‘be aware’ of what consumers are saying. In the previous example, Facebook could have just ignored the comments and stuck to their guns. I can’t say for sure what would have happened, but I can that the effects would have been damaging.
It’s pretty amazing how many marketers still ‘put earmuffs on’ every time they find a negative comment on the web. Many still discount the negative comments and continue feel good about the positive ones. Unfortunately, consumers do not behave this way. A single negative comment can be enough to keep a consumer from buying a brand of car, booking a hotel room or eating at a restaurant. Responding to feedback, both positive and negative, is most often the best approach to establishing prescience and showing you care. A response allows you to express to that customer, and other consumers, that you’ve heard the complaint and intend to address it in order to make future experiences better.
Do know what you’re consumers are saying about you? More importantly, have you responded to let them know that you’re paying attention?
Tags: facebook, social media marketing
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