Creating a hotel social media management routine
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As a hotel manager or marketer, what social media networks should you monitor on a regular basis? It may be helpful for you to create a checklist of sites to visit and tasks to complete as part of your daily routine. Below is a list of components you may consider adding, but first here’s a mind map to help you visualize everything:
Social media maintenance (click for large version)
Note: For simplicity, I use a popular example for each category instead of listing all sites there. For example “TripAdvisor” could also include the other travel review sites you’re listed on.
Because your priorities will be different than that of other readers, it would be difficult for me to tell you how often to perform each task. That will depend on your needs and priorities, and may change over time.
Here are those core tasks from the mindmap above in list format:
- TripAdvisor – Check for new reviews & content
- TripAdvisor – Respond to all reviews (positive & negative)
- TripAdvisor – Encourage happy guests to review
- Blog – Post new entries
- Blog – Check statistics (Feedburner & Analytics) for growth and traffic spikes
- Blog – Moderate comments
- Blog – Respond to comments
- Blog – Review other industry blogs
- Twitter – Post messages
- Twitter – Reply to other users
- Twitter – Respond to direct messages
- Twitter – Monitor search terms for leads & reputation
- Flickr – Post new photos
- Flickr – Monitor & respond to comments
- Flickr – Review group submissions
- Flickr – Submit your photos to other relevant groups
- Flickr – Monitor the Explore page for creative ideas
- Digg & Delicious – Submit important posts
- Digg & Delicious – Check popularity of your content
- Digg & Delicious – Browse popular stories for ideas & trends
(Just browsing the popular stories pages of Delicious as I wrote this post turned up a related article that discusses the technical trends here: The Future of Social Media Monitoring)
Again, it’s difficult for me to specify a social media routine that fits your situation. But the tasks listed above are important, and you should perform each of them at least occasionally. Experiment a little bit and find what works best for you.
I’d like your input on this: what other sites do you – or should you – check on a regular basis?
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Dear Josiah!
Another excelent post
Since I’ve began with Tiara Hotels & Resorts I’ve tried to implement a SocialMedia strategy based on 4 channels:
- Blog
- Twitter
- Facebook
- Flickr
as well as tried to improve Tripadvisor review comments by my hotels owners/managers, and starting to be part of their local/region forums.
After 8 months of usage, I would say that, along with Flickr (with great utility for our groups and sales departments, allowing them to send with just one link an entire set of pcitures of each hotel), Twitter is the channel that take most of time due to its simplicity and being the most direct channel of communication between partners, clients, companies as well as media, blog writers and others with us.
To be honest, my idea of our blog is to include it on our website, allowing our partners, affiliations and others to provide us contents to make the blog horizons a little bit more wider. At the moment, it’s quite on stand-by.
YouTube would be definetely a channel to consider pretty soon, as well as, in a near future, allowing clients to post upload directly on our website their photos and videos.
Regarding Facebook, I’ve started with a Group Page but with the updates on Facebook’s platform, I’ve turned to a Fan Page. I’m still checking some (good) examples, like Virgin Atlantic page, to see what could we do more, and better.
Digg and Delicius are still on my “to do list”
Cheers!
I found this article on twitter (via @blogontravel!) That would be great to list more resources and not just a sample of each category. Anyway that’s a great start. I want opinions from hoteliers!
Cheers! Great post, and I am sure people will be grifting your image. I have a spreadsheet put together with this, and I find it interesting how much it changes. But you nailed the stuff right on the head. I am just dealing with FB’s problems with brand pages and interacting in the stream. It still looks like spam to me, and am wondering how many others are successful with FB?
I note FB isn’t even in there, and I am having trouble making it functional. I am using Yahoo pipes which seem inconsistent, as well as attempt to get twitter hooked up. It just has been frustrating to me.
And although I am not part of the cult, the sort of interaction and conversation that happens on yelp is amazing. Replying to guests, as well as public replies a la TripAdvisor that they just put together:
http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2009/04/09/yelp-to-allow-businesses-to-respond-to-reviews-publically/
I have converted off twitter, of course. But I am just starting to convert off tripadvisor (people seeing the manager response and contacting me) as well as off of yelp and the yelp talk threads.
I am also quite aware of this being a long term professional niche, and how worried I get not seeing viable ad models to sustain these social media sites long term.
There’s my afternoon ramble. Cheers!
Michael
@hhotelconsult
Also… unless the brand is HUGE, I am not totally getting digg or delicious. Possibly I am using it wrong, possibly I am not “getting” it… but I am not sure how the limited popularity or interaction can convert into the conversation. Is it simply long term brand building and recognition?
@Nuno – Is the time you spend on Twitter something you do by choice or out of necessity? Are you seeing a good return on your time investment there?
@Michael – Yelp does have a great user community, particularly in the Bay Area. You’ve written some great posts on that network, and I’m going over to re-read those now.
Regarding social bookmarking tools, I view it as something you build into the site’s architecture to allow people to share cool content with friends. Of course, this assumes you’re creating cool content, which not all small (or large!) hotels are doing.
Does twitter really bring traffic? I have facebook groups and pages which do bring a fair amount of traffic.
Lee
Hi Lee – from my experience I have to say that yes, Twitter really does bring traffic. It’s actually the #1 referring site to this blog, and I know many others are getting similar results.
I would say it depends a little bit on the content of your site. If you’re continually updating with fresh ideas and information (always a smart move) you’ll probably see better results from Twitter than if you have a static, never-changing site.
We had some good discussion regarding Facebook here – I’d love to hear a little bit more about your experience:
http://www.hotelmarketingstrategies.com/your-thoughts-on-hotels-using-facebook/