Welcome to day one of the 21 day hospitality social media challenge!
The process of building your online reputation requires that you begin thinking like your guests and focus on developing a comprehensive web presence.
One great way for you to perhaps visualize your online reputation is to think in terms of what we call a social media footprint.
Meaning, it’s not just one location on the Internet, such as your website or TripAdvisor or Facebook where potential guests find you, but rather, it is a culmination of all of your online activities that drives customers through your door. The benefit of a comprehensive online presence is that if you are not #1 in the rankings people will be able to find you via numerous different avenues.
Many potential guests want to find out every detail about your hotel online and to read about you. You can be PROACTIVE and give them easy ways to discover you through distributed channels, without necessarily spamming people constantly about how great you are.
From the moment a person decides to take a trip they begin to form perceptions and expectations about what they think the experience will be like. Therefore, optimizing your reputation is largely dependent upon your ability to understand your customer and to ensure that you are attracting the right guest via your social media engagement and content creation activities.
Your online efforts are almost like tending a garden. If you look after it on a daily basis it should grow and flourish, but if you limit your work to just taking some initial steps, your online presence, like the garden will wither.
We are all here to learn and the beauty and frustrating aspect of online marketing is that you can never know everything about everything! There is always more you that can learn.
Day one task: For day one of the social media challenge, your initial assignment is to undertake a Google search for your property and conduct a simple reputation audit.
When you search the name of your hospitality venture online, are you pleased with the results? Do former guests have a positive or negative sentiment towards your business? If you have created content before, such as blog posts or YouTube videos, do they appear in the rankings?
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