Ever feel like you’re reaching social media overload? You’re not alone. More and more people are reporting dissatisfaction with the impact social platforms have on their lives. They’re a great way to stay in the loop with family and friends sure, but let’s face it: they’re also often banal, time-sapping and increasingly filled with negativity and trolling.
Many consumers, and particularly millennials, have also simply had enough of the deluge of branded content on social – something Facebook has acknowledged with their recent move to favour content from friends and family over ads in users’ newsfeeds.
Your guests don’t want social media to become an endless stream of promotional posts. As a brand, you need to lead this change, or risk losing your audience altogether.
Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to rescue portions of your audience who may be reaching social media burnout, and it all starts with a shift in thinking.
1. Rebuild trust with exemplary customer service
This is a no-brainer. Sure, your guests know they are being marketed to, but they want to feel they can trust your brand. To gain their trust, move your focus away from using social media as a platform for publishing promotional content and towards using it as a tool to build relationships with your audience. Your guests want to have a positive relationship with your brand. If they reach out to you for any reason, be there ready to respond – and fast- every single time. A key component of winning the trust and loyalty of your audience is to master, and where you can, over-deliver on the basics of customer service.
It sounds obvious, and it is, but it’s surprising how many small and medium sized hotels just don’t make the grade. In fact, most don’t even have the tools needed to grow their digital presence effectively and master digital customer service. If you care about holding on to your current guests as much as you care about finding new ones, then you’ve got to adopt a customer-first approach and invest in the right tools and services to help you respond promptly. If you don’t, your guests are only ever a few clicks away from your competitors.
2. Don’t promote. Engage.
The evidence is clear: consumers just aren’t interested in a non-stop flow of promotional content from brands. Like we said, social media marketing should be about building relationships, and who enjoys making friends with someone who only wants to talk about themselves? Your guests want real conversations.
If your hotel’s strategy is to broadcast one promotion after another, you can bet they’ll stop listening pretty fast.
On the other hand, if you engage authentically with them on a personal level, there’s a good chance they’ll want that interaction to continue.
3. Turn fans into advocates
Now that you’re fighting against newsfeed algorithms to get your social content out there and seen by a wider audience, you’ll have to work even harder to encourage your biggest fans to do some word of mouth marketing for you. The more guests that share your content and talk positively about your property, the higher the chance your posts will be tagged as high quality and relevant and eventually work their way into more peoples’ feeds. This means actively encouraging reviews and shares at every opportunity – by staying on top of your social analytics, making it as easy as possible to leave feedback and even offering personalised incentives to foster deeper engagement with your brand. By encouraging guests to do some of your marketing legwork for you in the most authentic ways possible, you’ll be able to make Facebook’s new-look newsfeed work in your favour.
As a brand, ask yourself each time you post: is this interaction or content likely to contribute to guests’ sense of social fatigue or inspire them to build a stronger relationship with you?
Have you experienced social media burnout? How are you tackling the problem with your hotel’s social audience? Let us know in the comments below!
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