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Working on your hotel’s social media marketing? Digital marketing agencies stress the importance of incorporating social media into your strategies. With more and more potential guests interacting via social media and getting inspiration for their next adventure, it’s vital to have your property in front of their screens at the right time and place.
True enough, social media has been proven to be effective in increasing visibility, improving brand recognition, and boosting direct bookings. However, there’s more to social media marketing than creating a brand profile across multiple platforms, posting details and photos of your property, and calling it a day. Let’s start with one important aspect: making the most out of your social media channels.
In this article, we’ll discuss the two major social media channels commonly used for hotel digital marketing and how to take advantage of them for an optimal strategy.
Facebook: Post valuable content, boost engagement, and run ads
Facebook is often the first thing that comes to mind when we talk of social media. This hotel digital marketing agency agrees that it remains to be the most popular and most accessed social media network, giving you limitless opportunities to promote your hotel.
What makes an effective Facebook post?
So you’ve created a Facebook page for your brand and completed your page’s profile with a profile picture, business information, and cover photo. Now what? It’s time to share your valuable pieces of content that would appeal to your target audience including:
- Eye-catching pictures of your hotel’s interior and exterior, with engaging captions.
- Travel guides and other blogs posted on your official website
- Photos and brief information about nearby scenic destinations or tourist attractions, restaurants, shopping centres, and more
- Short videos
- Stories and live videos
- Special offers, deals, and promos
Boost engagement
The next step is finding a way to boost engagement, which can be demonstrated in the number and frequency of shares, likes (or reactions), tags or mentions, and comments.
- Make use of user-generated content (like posts of your previous guests)
- Encourage guests to use check-ins or location tags on their videos and photos
- Offer attractive rewards in exchange for engagement
- Host games and competitions
- Share memes and quotes, or post questions that require a call-to-action
Run ads
If you have a budget for ads, Facebook (with billions of users) is the perfect place to do so.
Setting up Facebook ads for your hotel property can help you reach wider audiences and get more sign-ups. Next to improving brand awareness, some of the benefits include generating a higher ROI and getting more direct bookings.
An effective Facebook Ad has an eye-catching primary text, headline, description, and image or video. You can download free Facebook Ad templates to get you started.
Instagram: Visual appeal is the key
Instagram, the second most popular social media network, is a highly-visual platform. Users, like potential guests, go to IG to see beautiful images and engaging videos. That said, your visual content should be of high quality.
What makes an effective Instagram post?
- High-resolution and interesting pictures and short videos of your hotel’s ambiance, services, amenities, behind the scenes
- High-quality content featuring the beauty of your city or destination, as well as the nearby attractions future guests may be interested in
- Upcoming events, promotions, and discount offers
- User-generated content
- Travel t[ips
- Local food tips
- Eye-catching graphics like quotes, memes, and more
Boost engagement
It’s not enough that you have tons of followers and lots of visually-appealing images. The key to a social media marketing’s success is the rate of engagement. Here are a couple of ways your hotel property can engage with your followers and get leads:
- Post Instagram stories (give updates about your hotel via BTS, promotions, ongoing deals, important announcements, and user-generated content)
- Be on the lookout for mentions and tags from previous and current guests and repost their content
- Create unique hashtags for your hotel and include them in all your posts
- Share reels (a.k.a those 15-30-second entertaining videos) about your hotel.
- Host competitions and polls to generate comments, likes, and shares
#Hashtag your way up
Instagram can also be a great search engine —thanks to hashtags, which serve as links between brands and consumers. Hashtags are used to categorise posts by topic, helping Instagram efficiently deliver the right content to the right people.
Facebook and Instagram Cross-Posting
Don’t forget to interlink your social media pages and do cross-posting. It refers to the act of creating a stunning piece of content and posting it across multiple social media platforms.
Since Instagram is already linked to Facebook, you can experience cross-app messaging, thus creating a balanced audience and traffic and streamlining your media strategy. You can create free and paid campaigns and promote them between both channels quickly.
Before you go
Facebook and Instagram are the two social media giants most commonly used for social media marketing. Depending on your business goals, needs, and budget, you can also tap into other social media platforms to improve brand awareness, engage with followers, and boost direct bookings.
For instance, LinkedIn is a great channel for sharing content that’s engaging to business travellers and potential business partners, such as promotions and conferences. YouTube is utilized by hotel owners with a bigger budget for video content and SEO. YouTube content may include virtual tours, short films, testimonials, timelapse videos, travel vlogs, and other forms of video content to give users a better feel for the amenities and services they offer.
Whatever social media platform you’re utilising for digital marketing, always remember the following tips to make your campaign successful:
- Identify and define your target audience
- Plan around seasonality
- Listen to your previous guests and use learnings from reputation management to improve constantly
- Give a face to your hotel by making your approach more human
- Hire influencers to leverage the idea behind “word of mouth” marketing
- Define strong goals
- Be consistent on social media
Author Bio: Carmina Natividad is a web content writer during the day and a foodie, musician, coffee connoisseur, and plant mom when her day shift is over. She enjoys sharing her insights about blogging, web design, SEO, and other forms of digital marketing. To know more about digital marketing, check out the blogs of SPRINT DIGITAL Agency Dublin.
