Social Media for Hotels: What the Oscars Can Teach You

Viewers of Sunday’s 85th Academy Awards generated 8.9 million Oscars-related tweets. Busy Twitter hands sent an impressive 2.1 million tweets during the red carpet and a whopping 6.8 million during the awards show.
Social media for hotels means that you need to do more than have a Facebook page and you should be branching out through multiple social media outlets in order to build brand loyalty. For hotels, this means at least Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Google+ and Pinterest.
Here are some ideas to help you start posting:

1. Ask for new ideas or suggestions. Customers love feeling like their voice is heard. Let them know that your business is open to feedback, whether it is positive or negative. When people answer, take this as an opportunity for dialogue. Prove to them that you are willing to improve. With social media concerning hotels, you can ask for improvements on both your product and service. Win, win.
2. Take that feedback and use it. Often times, the people who monitor social media channels of larger businesses are not the ones who qualified to make any final decisions. Even with smaller businesses, it is still important to make sure that the feedback that you’re getting from your social network gets heard by the right ears of the company. Take those social media hotel comments and pass them on and improve upon wherever needed. Be sure to close the loop and let your various audiences know of any changes. 
3. “Speak” with a unique voice. Let’s consider the Oscars again: You can learn a lot about winning people over from my own personal idol, Jennifer Lawrence. She’s cheeky, snarky and I’ll admit, a tad abrasive. But it’s ultimately that quirky personality of hers that ends up charming the crowd. Make your online voice genuine and personal and people will respond. 
4. It’s not always about you. Constantly advertising your products or services will get old quick and your connections won’t appreciate it when they’re constantly being targeted with ads. Try posting a fun contest, polls or questions instead. With social media for hotels, you could post fun events happening in or around your location to draw guests in.
5. Use your time wisely. Many companies slack when it comes to social media because they believe they don’t have the time or resources. You honestly don’t need a lot of time to create an effective online presence. There are many free social media communication consolidation tools out there. With some planning you can even schedule out your communication in advance. And if you need help, there are inbound marketing agencies that can help you with your social media for hotels.

Let us end on one final, Oscars-related note: Even the always-popular Adele has used social media to her advantage. She previously “advertised” her new song “Skyfall” by posting a photo of the sheet music on Twitter and then turned around and posted the song’s artwork on her Facebook page. Later, her performance of the song and its subsequent win for Best Original Song was Twitter’s second and fourth top-tweets-per-minute. Coincidence? I think not. Adele knows the importance of using multiple platforms, and “Someone Like You” could certainly learn a thing or two from it.

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