Benefits of Using Social Media Marketing for The Hospitality Industry

Social media marketing for is key to increasing reputation, boosting direct bookings, and improving brand awareness. The use of social media can often inspire a persons next trip or booking, it can often be the deciding factor between one hotel or another depending on what the guest is looking for. 

Campaigns: When you start planning your strategy, make sure you plan around seasonality. Seasonality can refer to what to publish based on different holidays, and can also refer to a strategy based on low, mid-season and peak seasons. Your contents will change based on the time of year and what you are trying to accomplish. 

Reviews: TripAdvisor and Google are not only powerful tools to drive bookings but they’re also key to unlocking important learnings about where your hotel is lacking or where it’s excelling. Use what you learn on your social networks to make improvements to the hotel experience. Make sure to respond to all reviews, both positive and negative, so that users get a sense that the hotel cares about what their followers have to say. Most importantly, if you get an awesome review on TripAdvisor, share it with your followers, because no content is better social media marketing for hotels than positive reviews. 

Creating a connection: Use your channels to give a face to your hotel. That is, create a human connection so that potential guests know who is behind your team. Highlight a staff member once a week on your different channels. Interact with guests by creating raffles, contests, taking polls and asking them for feedback.

A research tip i often use myself when booking a hotel in Ireland or abroad is to glance through the hotel's social media platforms (usually instagram). I will then look at how many times the hotel has been tagged as location, this can usually give a good idea of the popularity of the hotel and can show the hotel through the customers images and not how the hotel what you to perceive it.

Social media marketing for hotels is one of the most powerful tools to drive traffic to your website out there, so make sure you use it to your favor. Use it to create a human connection and to interact on a regular basis with your guests.