Mr. McKean

Social Media & PR

Social Media 101 - Part I: A Hotelier’s Guide to Social Media Marketing

By Michael McKean, CEO, The Knowland Group

More than 60 million status updates are posted on Facebook every day. Twenty hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. A new Twitter account is created every three seconds and over 1,500 articles are posted on Wikipedia every hour. Blogs have become so prevalent that statisticians stopped counting them after 200,000,000.

Social media is not just a passing fad. According to a Harris poll conducted in April of this year, 34 percent of Americans have used social media as an outlet to rant or rave about a company, brand, or product. Why does this matter for your hotel? Because peer recommendations, from friends or virtual strangers, are the most trusted forms of advertising, according to a Nielson Global Online Consumer Survey.

“The world is evolving, people are connecting in a different way,” says Colleen Parnell, director of sales and marketing at the Crowne Plaza Orlando-Universal. “I don’t really know where it’s going to go but if we don’t get comfortable with it on the front side it’s going to be up and gone before we get the chance. We grow as it grows.”

Social media web sites have triggered an ever-growing global conversation on every topic imaginable. The question is not whether your hotel should be using social media to start a conversation about your property; that conversation is already happening. The question is, are you going to be a part of it?

For hotel executives, it’s even more crucial. A well-executed social media strategy can easily accomplish two of the most important goals for any hotel: get people talking about their property and inspire customer loyalty. This leads to a more recognized and well-respected brand and, most importantly, an increase in transient and group business.

“In the last two and a half years Facebook and Twitter have really taken off,” says Al Luciano, director of sales and marketing at La Torretta Lake Resort & Spa. “It’s a low cost way of reaching people and I think it’s the way the new generation of buyers want to buy.”

The great thing about a hotel is there’s always something new going on. A swanky reception, property renovation, celebrity sighting, or a satisfied customer…there’s never a shortage of things to talk about through social media. Every post doesn’t need to be earth shattering, but collectively they will help grow and improve the online conversation about your property.

In the five-part series “A Hotelier’s Guide to Social Media Marketing,” we’ll be looking at the many ways your hotel can grow and drive the conversation about your property on a number of social media platforms.

To begin with, here are the top ten best practices you should know to get your property started off right with social media:

Get started - right now.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in social media is to put off getting started. Hashtags, like buttons, retweets – it can be daunting at first. But it’s not about mastering every facet of social media from the beginning. The important thing is to start generating content right away, and through as many channels as possible. Figure out what your overall goals are, develop a few different ways to start attacking those goals, and then take the plunge!

Experiment.

The easiest and best way to learn about social media is by doing. When you first get started it’s all about experimentation: trying new things, seeing what works, and adjusting your strategy from there. Give your ideas a try. Chances are they will each resonate with someone in your target audience. If they don’t, then you’ll know not to try that again.

Varying the type of content you share also keeps people interested. If all you post every day is the dinner menu at your restaurant, no one is going to pay attention for long. Instead, post a picture of your featured dish. Then share a link to a news story about a new hospitality trend, a quote from a satisfied guest, and a video of your GM’s latest speech. There’s always something new going on at your property, your job is to capture and share that story.

Post regularly.

Once you decide to get involved on social media sites, it’s crucial that you make a commitment to updating regularly. For Twitter, that means on at least a daily basis. With other sites such as Facebook you can stretch that to every couple of days, but any more than that and you’ve lost your audience.

“We want to make sure that there’s always fresh content and people have a reason to stay connected with us on whichever social media sites they choose,” explains Parnell.

Stay relevant.

If you find yourself writing a blog about an event that happened last Tuesday, you’ve missed the point. Social media followers want to know what’s happening at your property today, not last week. They want to see content that is relevant to their lives and their interests right now. That’s why it’s minimizing turnaround time is crucial. The advice to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good is never more aptly applied than in the case of social media.

Track what’s being said about your hotel.

In order to involve yourself in the conversation, you have to know what people are saying. On Twitter, this can be as simple as setting up a permanent search of your property name using tools such as HootSuite or TweetDeck. Similar searches can be set up to find mentions of your hotel on blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and more. Social media is the cheapest and most direct way to gauge what people think about your property. Take advantage of it!

Take part in the conversation.

Once you know what people are saying, you can respond and start leading the conversation. This obviously involves responding to anyone who reaches out to your hotel with a question or complaint. The quicker you answer these types of posts the better. Being responsive also means promoting what other people are saying. Using tools such as retweeting on Twitter and like and share on Facebook is a great way to spread the good news about your hotel. Something that takes so little time can be so effective, especially since people are more likely to trust the information when they know it comes from an outside source.

Avoid a constant stream of self-promotion.

No one likes spam, whether it’s in their mail box, their inbox, or their Twitter feed. If all you ever do is talk about how wonderful your hotel is, you are doing yourself and your followers a disservice. One way to avoid coming off as spam is to show instead of tell. Let photos and videos of your property speak for themselves. Another great way is to become a trusted resource for your fans and followers by providing interesting or useful information about your region, the travel industry, and whatever else your hotel is involved in.

Brandon Harper, E-commerce specialist with the hotel management company Winegardner & Hammons, says hoteliers often fall into the trap of using social media strictly for promotion. Instead, explains Harper, “They need to ask questions like ‘How was your stay?’ and be engaging with customers.”

Involve all your employees.

In order to keep the social media beast fed you need a constant stream of original content. The easiest way to do this is by involving all of your employees. These are the people on the front lines who are a part of the everyday activities at your property: interacting with guests, preparing meals, and organizing events. Tapping into their first hand experience means your content will be timely, diverse, and authentic for your audience.

At the Crowne Plaza Orlando-Universal, they have set up one email address that all employees can send updates to, whether that be a photo, video, blog, or just a sentence about what’s going on. Then their social media guru goes through all the content and posts it on the hotel’s various social media sites.

“Everybody takes the responsibility of making sure we have fresh content,” says Parnell.

Keep it all connected.

One vital mission of social media is branding. You want to show the person who has never stayed at your hotel, never seen your brochure or visited your website what you are all about. To do this it’s important you stay consistent across all social media platforms.

Obviously content should be adapted to fit each site, but the core message should stay consistent. Whether that message is that your hotel is the friendliest, the most lavish, the greenest, or the most inexpensive, make sure it is reflected in your content. It’s also important to interconnect all your content: post your latest YouTube video on Facebook, put a link to your blog on Twitter, and invite your followers to become your fans!

Make it unique.

Since there are millions of people out there right now taking part in social media, you have to be able to make yourself heard over the din. The more distinctive your content, the more people who will be interested in hearing what you have to say. Hoteliers have been coming up with new ways to make their hotel stand out for decades; now it’s time to put that skill to work in the world of social media.

Look for Part II in our Social Media 101 series: “Top Tips for Twittering.”

Michael McKean founded the Knowland Group in 2004. He is directly responsible for the company's strategic planning, operations management and product development. His background in designing and implementing enterprise sized information systems has given him a wealth of knowledge that has served him well as the lead visionary behind the Knowland Group. Mr. McKean graduated from the University of Colorado and has taken graduate level courses in information systems. He is an active member in the Washington, DC chapter of the Entrepreneur's Organization. Mr. McKean can be contacted at 302-645-9777 Ext: 204 or MMcKean@KnowlandGroup.com Extended Bio...

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