Social Media Strategies to Promote Hotels: Which One Do You Use?

You learned recently that a lot of hotel marketing is happening online.  And being a dynamic hotel operator, you signed up for the most popular social networking sites and/or blogs right away.  But these are not the only channels you can use to promote your hotel, resort or apartment.

Here are some strategies you may want to consider when marketing your hotel.  Which one do you use?

Facebook Pages - Facebook allows the hotel to customise the tabs to tailor it to your specific hotel or business.  Some best practices to follow while creating Facebook page are the putting reservation widgets, having event pages, creating custom tabs to highlight hotel specific items such as meetings and conferences, things to do, etc.  Read on the 3 ways on how to make the most our of your Facebook Page.

They also use Facebook’s Be My Friend to become connected with organisation which are most important for their hotel business.  Hotel operators also promote their Facebook Profile Page by uploading an email list of your customers, business associates and ask them to become friends with on Facebook.  One popular way to also promote business on Facebook is by offering time sensitive specials.

Destination Blogs – Hotels and resort promote and/or create destination blogs showcasing local events, news, and specials. Information posted on the blog may get indexed faster.

Search-Optimised Video – Videos are fast-becoming the next big thing when it comes to content that’s why some hotel/resorts create and promote their very own search-optimised video about their destination and other local attractions and upload them on Video Search engines such as Youtube.  Youtube is the fourth largest search engine and drives significant traffic.


Photo Sharing – Pictures are truly worth a thousand words that’s why hotels and resort take time to create a channel or an account on photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picassa to showcase their hotel and destination photos.  Commonly, they tag the pictures with relevant keyword phrases.  Pictures about the destination that convey information to potential viewers are more likely to produce better results

Twitter – Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service, owned and operated by Twitter Inc., that enables its users to send and read other user messages called tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page.  Hotel operators can post relevant information to people using the site.  They also stay connected and up-to-date on local happenings by finding out relevant businesses in their area and following them.  Here’s how to get started on Twitter.


Integrated Channels - Once your channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) are set up, it is crucial to integrate and cross network all your channels.  Make sure that the social media icons are displayed clearly on your website so that consumers can get to those channels. Cross-link Flickr, Twitter and YouTube to your Facebook account to help you in optimisation, keeping your content fresh as well as in expanding your network.   

Social Media Channel Monitor

We recommend hotels should actively monitor social media channels and review sites.  The success of social media efforts can be measured in many different ways such as Awareness (the number of friends & followers, social media mentions, new relevant links), Conversion (Track through promo codes and Google Analytics), Relationships (how much interaction, who is initiating) and Engagement (how many unique visitors, how much time on site, how frequent do they visit).