The hotel industry understands the value of customer reviews—what people say about their brand is what helps attract repeat customers. With more than 955 million monthly active users, 81 percent of which are outside of the U.S. and Canada, it’s not surprising to see top hotels leveraging Facebook as a way to reach customers. Here are a few ways hotels are telling their story:
Visual Story Telling
The hotel industry is one of the most detail-oriented industries in the world. So naturally they apply this merit to social media. Here’s how they do it.
Research shows that, in general, users like photos twice as often as text updates. And they share videos 12 times more than photo and text posts combined. As a result, hotel brands use high-quality visual content to attract consumers’ attention. Users love to see appealing food photos, comfy, white linen beds, and giant, clean swimming pools. I mean, who doesn’t?
Here’s an example. Inter Continental utilizes high quality, fancy photos to present its Facebook timeline everyday. Ritz-Carlton also leverages high-quality photos and videos that appeal to consumers on their Facebook page.
Consumer-Generated Content
Getting hotel guests to generate content is an interactive way to connect with consumers. We have already started to see hotels using this tactic. For example, Inter Continental Hotel created an album on its Facebook page to collect all photos that its guests shared on Facebook. Indigo Hotel applies a similar tactic, except they use Pinterest to show all the hotel photos from its guest around the world.
Instagram is another great platform for visual, user-generated content. Ink 48 NYC’s rooftop bar has one of the best views of NYC – and the hotel management knows it. As a result, the hotel encourages guests to take pictures of the hotel, its food, its view, or anything that’s related to their hotel experience and use #ink48 when uploading photos to Instagram. Then the hotel aggregates the photos into a centralized hub – their website.
Social, Local and Mobile
Since social media is more about communication and relationships more so than other marketing mediums, SoLoMo (Social, Local and Mobile) becomes more popular, and probably, is one of the best ways to demonstrate how to communicate and keep relationships with a target audience.
Instead of talking about the hotel itself, most hotel brands share content that talks about lifestyle, art, culture, urban movements, general trends, how they like to have fun, etc. How do they leverage this using social media? SoLoMo is a good solution.
Morgans Hotel and CitizenM Hotel not only post hotel photos on Instagram (mobile app) and Facebook (social), but also share fancy cuisine photos or good sightseeing photos (localize) around the hotel to inspire the hotel guests.
The aforementioned trends are just some highlights of how social media is changing the way the hotel industry communicates with its customers. And as the hotel industry is proactively and aggressively, using social to reach its target audience, a brand that’s not up for playing the social game, can definitely fall behind.