1. Showing up is not enough: Your Guests and prospects are busy, connected and interacting with everybody but you today. While creating a social presence for the hotel is just a start, it is how you engage with people that attracts them to you.
This requires a constant engagement program that is, a plan for using social media to meet goals – that extends beyond the typical marketing of “follow us on Twitter” or “Like us on Facebook.”
2. You can’t be on all Social Channels: Many hotel marketing managers are excited about technology and they overextend themselves because they want to be part of the latest trend. The key is to only be where your customers, prospects and those who influence them engage.
3. Authenticity and Transparency: The two magical ingredients to a successful social media effort are being authentic and transparent to your guests.
4. Not only Posting But Also Listen to Guests: Talking to people isn’t a business strategy. Some people run effective social media programs by listening instead of actually saying anything. But no matter if you converse with customers or not, you must have a purpose before you can engage.
5. Keep your core and repeat guests tuned in: Hotel marketers believe that uploading a video to Youtube is the key to anything going viral. What they don’t know is, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute!.
The chance of your video going viral naturally is basically nil. Make sure to identify all of the potential guests and influencers your hotel and reached out to them in advance of and during the video release.
This will make sure that the video was watched, shared, commented etc. and make it the trending.
6. Overposting: According to Facebook, the average user likes four to 8 new posts each month. So keep in mind that what is important is the quality of the content and not just flooding the user’s wall with back to back low-quality posts.
7. Too Much Sales Oriented: Don’t try to push only sales feeds to the followers. This will eventually make the guests to unlike or unfollow the hotel’s social profile.
8. Boring Social Profile: Be up to date with the latest trends and try to have engaging contents.
9. Avoid Responding: Always respond to the guest questions or feedback even if its a negative one.
10. All Social Networks are different: Do not think that engagement and use or all type of social channels are the same. Try to make use of each of them as per their individual strength.