Mr. Bifulco

Social Media & PR

How Hotels Can Measure Social Media Success

By Ryan Bifulco, Founder & CEO, Travel Spike

That is the big question these days. How do I really measure this social media hocus pocus? What is the true value or benefit of social media? How many bookings did it generate? Too bad there are no magic buttons to push for one easy answer. There isn’t one tool or one firm that can track and measure every possible social media mention that your hotel obtains. Social media is too vast and too dynamic to pin it down. It does not fit nicely into a certain box or stand still long enough to be properly measured. Social media also likes to mingle with so many other departments and areas of your hotel that measuring it is becoming just as difficult as measuring the impact of your hotel’s name or lobby.

Social media influences users to search for your hotel online. So you cannot simply credit search engine marketing with all of those bookings since many users would not even type in your hotel name without first being exposed to it through social media. Social media lives everywhere, so it can be a daunting task to measure TripAdvisor reviews, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn and hundreds of others. What about the 150 million blogs out there? These social outlets all take different forms, so measuring which usually counts on some type of uniform aspects can be challenging. If you think just because you have setup a Google alert for your hotel’s name that you will be informed every time anyone mentions your hotel online, then visit our Brooklyn Bridge for sale on eBay.

Social media marketing has become the new branding and awareness. It allows your hotel to get impressions and connect with your customers all year long so that you are considered when they do need to book. I said back in 2007 that I would rather have 1,000 people spend 2 minutes on my site than 10,000 people spend 10 seconds on my site. So the click is becoming less and less important in all aspects of online marketing. Time spent is moving up the charts as a must have metric in your analysis of ROI. Social media is about engagement and interaction with your customers and prospects. This interaction fuels future bookings even offline.

To measure social media you must have a sound methodology and use a variety of measurements that fit your hotel. You must track the social impressions you received in addition to simply bookings. You also might track how many signups you received to your email newsletter. With foursquare and other mobile applications you can track how many check-ins you had since that links the virtual world to the real world. To tally up social media impressions make sure to factor in the viral component of social media. Track the customers or followers of your followers. If you have 25,000 followers, then each time you tweet you are reaching not just your 25,000 but all of your followers that retweeted you. So if 1 of your followers had 100,000 followers and retweeted you, then you would be getting 100,000 social media impressions. This concept is similar to tracking a magazine at a doctor’s office which might be read 100 times instead of just 1 time if it was delivered to a household.

Along the same lines, a magazine claims a readership circulation of 1 million even though only half of those people might actually see your ad. The same applies with social media as every follower or fan will not see every post. We need more studies on how many of your followers actually read a particular tweet. Without the actual data it is hard to estimate, but here is an illustration if the data backed up this hunch. One of my Twitter accounts is @journeyPod which was rated as the #7 luxury brand on all of Twitter (not just travel) and currently has about 26,000 followers. I know that from tweeting a good link that is interesting 3 times to my 26,000 followers that I typically see about 200 clicks. So that is 78,000 social media impressions discounted by only 10% of users reading the tweet equals 7,800 users that read it. Then of the 7,800 users that actually saw the decent tweet, about 2.5% of them would click the link which equals about 200 clicks. So if I tweeted 10 times a day then on average all of my followers would see at least one tweet.

I like TweetReach as they try to analyze who is retweeting you and how many followers those people have etc. They are certainly on the right path. Not sure if the free version works differently than the paid service, but my account only showed 45 tweets for the sample size. In reality I had 150 tweets including @replies over the last week (it was a slow week). So you can triple the numbers from TweetReach to see that from my 150 tweets in one week I had about 1 million social media impressions for Twitter.

Let’s also remember not all Twitter users or Facebook fans are created equal as some might be very influential. You might have a journalist or blogger read your Facebook post and then give you credit or a mention in their article that reaches tons of people. We call that digital public relations and we will cover that in another blog. But let’s explore this concept of how influential a social media user might be. Klout is the king of this area and they do a pretty good job ranking users on a scale of 1 to 100. They factor in your followers as well as how active you are. They also look at how popular you are as far as number of retweets and engagement with your audience. Some hotels in Vegas started listing the Klout score in their PMS so that they could treat the influential social media users just like they might treat a high roller. I’ll be checking into those hotels very soon.

We also like Revinate which is a tool designed for hotels to monitor online reviews and some social media monitoring. We manage social media for nine Sofitel hotels and we review Revinate reports to help our team stay updated with hotel reviews on TripAdvisor and other sites. If you really wanted to track as many social media mentions as possible you would use a few tools and paid services. Another company to add in might be somebody like Radian 6 for example. But things can get expensive for the smaller hotel, so make sure you do not spend your entire budget on social media monitoring and not leave any resources to hire professionals to actually do the social media marketing. You can only have so many meetings to analyze data before it is time to take action. And in the social media arena, speed is the top factor to consider. It will often be too late to be effective if you try to run your social media the same way you might run traditional marketing with various levels of approval before going live.

So the key take away here is that measuring social media requires a holistic approach. You can add up stats from the top social sites to get an idea of how you are doing. Facebook and the larger ones offer free stats and reports to shed some light on success. One major factor is the number of fans and followers. A booking is great, but an engaged audience is even better and lasts longer. Just make sure you measure as much as possible since social media can be so elusive.

Ryan Bifulco is an Internet and travel pioneer with over 15 years of travel and new media experience. An expert on interactive travel, destination marketing, and tourism, Mr. Bifulco has been featured on Business Talk Radio's Travel Show, ABC Radio, NY Times, and USA Today. Mr. Bifulco launched the first ever luxury travel podcast in January of 2006 called journeyPod. He founded and leads Travel Spike, an interactive company offering custom marketing and technology solutions exclusively to the travel sector. Mr. Bifulco and the team at Travel Spike provide digital strategy, dynamic packaging booking engines, and online travel marketing to over 1500 travel clients. Mr. Bifulco can be contacted at Extended Bio...

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