Hotels and Social Media - The 5 Most Common Mistakes

It’s no secret that the hospitality industry has jumped face-first into the world of social media. These days almost every hotel has, at the very least, a Facebook Fan Page and Twitter handle. Many savvy hotels are hosting blogs, have their own YouTube channels and are even using Foursquare to help with their marketing needs. However, despite the massive numbers of properties who have a presence, there is a startlingly small amount who are actually using social media well.

Here are a few of the most common mistakes we see with hotels in social media

Mistake #1 – Only talking about your hotel. Sure, your property has a spa, restaurant, wedding venue, bar, club and a whole bunch of rooms, but that still doesn’t mean that your fans/followers only want to hear about that stuff. Feel free to sprinkle that in from time to time, but if you want to have people actively paying attention to your hotel in the social media world, you have to talk about something other than yourself.

Mistake #2 - Thinking Twitter and Facebook will suffice as your hotel’s full social media strategy. Yes, these two platforms are great, especially for the hospitality industry, but there are so many other places online that people are talking about your brand. It would be remiss to create a social media strategy that didn’t incorporate some of these other places. At the very least, any social media campaign should include the monitoring and responding to consumer generated content about your hotel on sites like Yelp, Trip Advisor, Orbitz etc. Taking it one step further, hotels have a natural opportunity to create a strategy with other popular social media sites. For instance, YouTube can be a great way to capitalize on the visual nature of the property and Foursquare allows hotels to reward their most loyal guests. In short, Facebook and Twitter alone just aren’t going to cut it.

Mistake #3 – Not creating separate strategies per social media platform. Yes, all of your social media campaigns should have one over-arching strategy (likely tying into your overall marketing goals), however, each platform that you are interacting on should serve a different purpose. If you are just planning on re-purposing your content from Facebook to Twitter, than why would a consumer have any incentive to connect with you on both? With so many aspects to each hotel, it is a lot easier to find a separate strategy per page than in so many other industries. This is why it is even more baffling that so many hotels’ only strategy seems to be to talk about promotions.

Mistake #4 – Thinking that number of fans or followers your hotel has is an apt way to measure the success of your social media campaign. When you are a fun/sexy/well-known brand (as many brands in the hospitality industry are), it won’t be challenging for you to pick up fans and followers because so many people have experienced your brand over time. What will be challenging is getting those people to engage with you in any real way. What good is 6,000 fans if they are all ignoring your tweets and not responding to your status updates? Numbers are useless if your content isn’t good. All of these platforms have made changes or apps to make it so that someone who fanned or followed you may never see a single message from your brand.

Mistake #5 – Not being human. Sure you are a property, a brand, an entity. Maybe you are uber luxury or super academic, but at the end of the day, you also have to be human. This means interacting with real people on Twitter, responding to people who comment to you on Facebook, and infusing personality into every tweet/status update/video etc. This, hands down, will help you stand out the most from every other member of the hospitality industry since virtually no one is doing it.

All this is not to say that there aren’t hotels using social media phenomenally. There are. I’d just like to see all hotels using these tools in creative and innovative ways. In fact, I’d like to challenge everyone in the hospitality industry to take a second look at their social media strategy and come up with a way to take their social media campaigns to the next level. If you are a hotel and you aren’t prepared to do so yourself – fear not – there are people who can help. In fact, I may just know of a company that specializes in social media for hotels and the hospitality industry…

Continue reading here: Social Media Changes the Game for Marketing Movies

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