Welcome to day two of the twenty-one day hospitality social media challenge!
The world is currently in the middle of a communications revolution. For the first time in history, travelers, hotel guests, and tourism customers have been given a powerful voice. Specifically, no matter where an individual might be located, people now have the ability to help, shape, and impact the travel experience of fellow voyagers and vacationers around the world entirely thanks to social media.
For you, the proactive and initiated hospitality professional, this communications revolution is great news because you now have the opportunity to be the brand manager, chief storyteller, and vice-president of marketing for your travel venture. In fact, with the amplification of content marketing and social media, there are now more opportunities than ever before for those in the tourism industry to reach out, connect, educate, and build relationships with potential guests.
Hospitality Social Media Building Blocks
The four basic building blocks of any successful, long term hospitality content marketing and social media strategy include:
- Educating guests and sharing stories that resonate with quality content.
- Optimizing online efforts to build authority and rank well for chosen keywords.
- Building brand and business evangelist relationships through earned trust.
- Implementing a proactive reputation management approach (this includes listening!).
However, navigating the social media waters is often intimidating, challenging, and downright frustrating. Many in the hospitality niche don’t know where to begin, or they feel so overwhelmed with the endless array of platform choices that they allow themselves to become paralyzed.
Hence, instead of taking the initiative to get started and claim a competitive advantage in their market, they make the detrimental decision to do nothing. If you have previously been hesitant to jump in, or got started and abruptly stopped, and now find yourself willing to embrace developing a comprehensive online presence, here are three questions to think about as you begin.
- Do you know who your ideal guest is?
- Does your current website, content, and social media interaction help your potential guests to solve a problem (e.g. do you provide insider tips, do you make trip suggestions, and are you posting engaging photos)?
- Are you willing to commit the time that is required?
Day two task: Analyze your competition
Hospitality is a competitive marketplace. On a daily basis you are probably very well aware of where you rank on TripAdvisor and that is tremendously important. But for today’s challenge, go beyond TA to discern what your competition is up to in other areas of the social space (blog, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest). Are they engaging with guests? What do they do well? How can your content and online interaction separate your hotel from theirs?
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