If you’re already juggling marketing campaigns across several social media sites, you need to be sure that any extras you add to the mix are going to be worth the time.
By now, you’ve probably heard of Pinterest and Instagram – two still relatively new photo sharing tools that rely on images as the chief source of content.
More and more hotels are slotting these sites into their social strategies and reaping the marketing benefits. But with your time and resources already stretched thin, how do you choose where to focus your efforts? Let’s take a closer look at the key advantages of both sites.
Instagram allows users to snap photos on their Smartphones, manipulate them using various filters, and then share them instantly with other members and their wider social network.
Social sharing
Part of the site’s success stems from the way it facilitates social sharing by making it simple for users to share their Instagram photos with friends and family on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr.
From your point of view, this makes it easy to supply all your other platforms with fresh and interesting content, while helping to drive your already-engaged fans on other social networks to your Instagram account.
Industry leaders love Instagram
Findings published by L2 Think Tank show that Instagram use within the hotel sector is on the up, and fast, with as many as 82% of branded properties making use of the visual platform already this year compared to just 19 % in 2012. Of those that have signed up, 33% manage accounts for both their global brand and for individual properties. What does all this tell you? That some of the most successful names in the hospitality industry believe in this tool’s marketing power, and that you’ll have no shortage of inspiration for your own Instagram initiative if you do sign up!
User-generated content made easy
It’s easy to stir up interest around your resort by using hashtags to encourage guests and industry insiders to engage with you. More than any other social network, Instagram taps into the real-time element that makes social interaction online fun and exciting and this can be harnessed to create valuable conversations between you and your guests.
Pinterest is a visual book-marking site which allows users to collect and share images via virtual pin-boards. Users can create and manage collections of images around a theme, ‘repin’ images from other users’ pinboards to their own and ‘like’ photos that catch their eye.
It’s the third most popular social network (behind Facebook and YouTube)
When it comes to the amount of time users actually spend engaged, Pinterest is one of the most popular social platforms on the net.
In fact, people spend more time pouring over their image collections here than they spend on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ put together. And since your guests spend so much time here, it’s highly likely that at some point they’ll choose to click-through to the source of the image, and will end up on your resort’s website, which leads us to the next Pinterest plus-point…
It provides a direct route to your website.
Since photos already play a vital role in driving bookings, it’s relatively quick and easy to create boards and pins from images that already appear on your resort’s website. What’s just as important as picking the right images is making sure that they’re well-optimized and link back to the source (your website.)
Through simple image sharing, Pinterest can drive your guests to your site in a way that cannot be matched easily on Instagram.
Contests enhance user engagement
A contest on Pinterest can be something as simple as asking your followers to re-pin one of your images, or perhaps a more complex task that requires them to create and curate their own boards relating to a specific theme – ‘favourite beaches on the Gold Coast’, for example.
This is a great way to create user-generated content and boost engagement levels with only a small amount of effort on your part.
With a combined membership base of approximately 160 million users worldwide, you can be sure your guests are using Instagram and Pinterest - which means you should be to.
Hopefully by now you have a better idea which site is best suited to your resort.
Have you signed up to Instagram or Pinterest yet? Let us know in the comments below.
