Ms. Oliver

Social Media & PR

5 Ways to Use Social Video to Promote Your Property

By Marlene Oliver, President, NJC Communications

Did you know that in November 2011 alone, 183 million U.S.- based Internet users collectively viewed more than 40 billion videos (According to research from Internet trend-tracking firm comScore)? Over the past few years video has become one of the fastest growing content types on the web and all predictions point at that trend continuing strong in 2012.

Beyond professionally produced commercial videos and virtual tours of hotels and resorts, lodging properties now have a diverse array of ways to market their properties using “social video.” Simply put, social video is video content created for social media sharing and/or social marketing purposes. These social share-focused videos are not meant to replace professional videos by any means. These types of videos are meant to augment your communications with prospective guests via entertaining and engaging content. When employed regularly as part of an integrated digital marketing program, social videos can create greater visibility for your property, drive traffic to your website, and encourage interaction and collaboration.

In 2012 video is predicted to be an even more essential element in a marketer’s arsenal with more and more people viewing and sharing videos online, including hundreds of thousands of consumers regularly streaming videos on their mobile devices. While there are some hotel properties that have been creatively using social videos to enhance their marketing and public relations efforts over the past few years, there are many more that deem this to be an unfamiliar and daunting task. It’s no surprise that social media has proven to be an essential tool for hotels to embrace in our digital age, however, many properties are only utilizing Facebook or Twitter and have not yet incorporated social video into their overall social networking strategies. If your hotel falls into this latter category and you are looking for ways to augment your 2012 social media and consumer outreach efforts, here are five practical and effective ways you can use social video to promote your property, drive more traffic to your website and create greater consumer interest and demand:

1. Engage, Interact, and Inform

First and foremost, your social videos should showcase topics that offer interesting and useful information. The content featured in your videos should highlight the uniqueness of your property and its differentiating aspects as well as the destination and area attractions in informative ways such as through interviews; instructions or demonstrations; reviews; special events, and activities or attractions onsite or nearby. Consider the topics that a prospective traveler may research prior to planning their trip and use those subjects as guides for creating videos that will be helpful for your target audience. The key is to be creative in accentuating the positives of your property using the benefits of video that can offer significantly more information than words alone.

A handy way to help organize your efforts is to create an editorial calendar that lists what kind of video content you will be looking to share each month. Essentially you would want to tie this into what consumers are searching for as it relates to your property including: local festivals and events, holidays and vacations, weather related activities, seasonal recipes, area conventions and conferences, etc.

You can complement these topics with “evergreen” videos to round-out your editorial calendar. Here are some ideas: Interview the concierge about some of your destination’s hot spots and the select services your concierge provides; Ask guests what their favorite aspects of the property and their stay have been and compile a few “resort review” videos; Have your chef present a savory signature menu item with a teaser to visit your website for the recipe or coupon to try the restaurant; Guide a conference attendee to and from get the convention center in a “how to” video; Showcase clips from a puppy’s pleasant stay at a pet friendly property; Create a series of short videos to music, each focused on a property’s niche or target audience, such as “ABC Resort in XYZ (destination)…fun at the kids club …active adventures outdoors…foodies, wine & restaurants…conferences and conventions…sun and beach fun…stories from honeymoons.” By building a month-by-month calendar, you will have a good sense of what you want to record that can be used as a guideline to promoting your property using social videos throughout the year.

2. Build Customer Relationships

Social videos are a great way to personalize the overall customer experience. When a prospective guest sees you or your team members on a video they develop a memorable and visual connection as if they are meeting you in person. To build greater customer relationships and personal connections through video, consider starting a video blog series. For example a series called “Our Favorites” can feature team members walking the audience through their favorite aspect of the property such as a special suite room, the steps to make a signature cocktail or menu item, an on-site activity, an exclusive amenity, etc. Additionally, posting these videos to your blog can invite additional engagement and interaction from your customers.

3. Create visibility

Once you create a video, promote it! YouTube reigns as the top video sharing site and with three billion videos served up a day, it is actually the second largest search engine after Google. So it is definitely advisable to post your videos to YouTube for free, as well as through a variety of other video share sites including Vimeo, Google Videos, Daily Motion, and Metacafé. (A platform that can help you save time in posting your videos is Tube Mogul’s. Once you have created profiles for the various video share sites Tube Mogul makes uploading video to all a breeze.) Promote your videos on video share sites by participating as part of the community as a video creator. View videos and add creators of videos you like to your contacts. Comment on videos and offer kudos to creators who post videos you enjoy.

It is imperative that you include keywords within the main title, tags, and description of a video for better search engine rankings. Consider what a consumer would be searching for that would lead them to your video and include those keywords in the metadata. Uploading your videos without including keywords will make it impossible for your video to be listed in the appropriate search results. These tiny details make the greatest difference when it comes to boosting your website traffic and increasing your video visibility.

4. Share and Be Shared

Beyond video share sites, upload your videos to your own hotel website or blog. Creating a designated page on your website to post your embedded videos and other informative and engaging resources (such as a blog, a virtual tour, etc.)will ultimately help drive more traffic to your site. Be sure to include “share” buttons for social networking as well as social share and social bookmarking sites in reference to your videos so links to your videos can be easily shared.

If you’ve uploaded a new video, post it to your property’s Facebook page, tweet about it on Twitter and share it with your circles via Google+. Your fans will watch videos that are of interest to them and they can also share the videos via their own pages. You can also search for niche groups on Facebook related to your videos, become a member of the group and when relevant based on the content, post your video to those Facebook group pages.

In addition to the social networking sites mentioned previously, links to your videos should also be submitted to content sharing and bookmarking sites such as Stumble Upon, Digg, Delicious, and Reddit to maximize exposure, share capability, and invite prospective linkbacks to your videos.

5. Enhance website content and SEO

Turn your videos into fresh searchable content for your website and blog. Google’s rapidly changing algorithms to produce better search results for users makes it even more important to update your website and blog on an ongoing basis with high quality, fresh content. One of the easiest ways to re-purpose a video as written content is simply to transcribe the audio and include it as copy under the embedded video clip on your website or blog. Additionally, you can create a downloadable PDF recapping the main points, tips, “how-to” steps, or other information included in the video in an easy to download PDF on your website. Take screen shots of the video to include as images on your website or photo gallery, in online news releases, and to submit to photo share sites such as Flickr. Use the summarized copy and images to create a PowerPoint slide show that can be posted to your site for downloading or shared online via slideshare.net.

Overall, social video can be an incredibly powerful tool to add to your hotel’s marketing mix. With millions of consumers viewing billions of videos on the web each month, including hundreds of thousands on mobile devices, and all indications are to continue increasing, the opportunities to promote your property using online video simply cannot be ignored. Developing a month-by-month strategic plan is a great way to help you to stay organized and on top of producing fresh social video content throughout the year. You should use a strategic approach when deciding what types of videos that you post, selecting video content that will be helpful and interesting for your target audiences as well as content that is reflective of your hotel’s brand and messaging. A final point to remember is that social videos are meant to create personal connections with those who view them and should not be created as generic hotel advertisements. Only post content that you think consumers would really be interested in watching and could benefit from, making them engaging, enticing to share, and encouraging for the viewer to take the action you seek – choosing your property for their leisure or business stay.

Marlene Oliver, APR, is a Public Relations, Marketing Communications, and Social Media PR specialist with more than 17 years of success in developing, launching, managing and measuring campaigns for Hospitality, Travel & Tourism clients. Known for her strategic approach to communications, Ms. Oliver founded NJC Communications in 2002. Ms. Oliver’s niche-focused boutique PR and Marketing Communications company remains at the forefront of the digital realm, serving among the first Travel & Hospitality PR firms to emphasize the importance of digital PR, SEO content development, and the ever-evolving role of social media in PR and Marketing. Ms. Oliver can be contacted at 305-491-0512 or moliver@njccorp.com Extended Bio...

HotelExecutive.com retains the copyright to the articles published in the Hotel Business Review. Articles cannot be republished without prior written consent by HotelExecutive.com.