In my Flickr guide for hotels, I explained how hotel marketers could use the popular photo-sharing site to promote their hotel. Now let’s look at how the community there can help you spread the word.
Start a Flickr group (or three)
I recommend you start by creating two or more groups: one for your hotel and one around a larger theme, such as your design concept or city. The latter is especially important if you’re located in a little-known destination and want to raise awareness.
Link: Create a group on Flickr
What is a group?
A Flickr group allows members to submit and share photos they have taken about a common subject. There is a huge variety in group topics; you may want to spend a few minutes browsing the most popular ones.
Shameless plug: My group – Hotel Design – showcases the latest interior design & architecture trends
Photographers love groups because submitting their photos usually results in more views and increased popularity.
Why owning a group is important for hotels
There are many benefits to managing your own Flickr group, including:
- Creating a central access point for all photos taken by guests and visitors
- Offering more content to people planning a trip
- The ability to crowdsource content for other marketing materials
- The opportunity to monitor your brand’s reputation
- Increased awareness: the Mumbai Taj Mahal has 340 photos in their group (including some high quality images). Each of these are included in search engine results, and raise the hotel’s profile.
Tips for effective Flickr group management
Actively solicit new submissions. Announce the new group in multiple communications channels. You may even want to search Flickr for existing relevant photos and invite the photographer to submit them to your group. Here is how the admin from the Mumbai Taj Mahal group described above is doing this:
Group invitation request
Cross-promote the group. Link to it from your blog. Highlight it on your website. People love seeing photos taken by real travelers like them. You may even create a slideshow of photos from the group, and feature it on your site. Flickr provides a tool that makes this super easy.
Recommend a tag for people to add to their Flickr photos when they take a picture of your hotel. This makes finding and sharing the photos easier. According to this blog post, the Ottawa Folk Festival used this message to encourage amateur photographers to upload and tag their photos:
Please take photos and videos of this event and upload them to sites like Flickr.com with the tag “ottawafolkfestival“. This will ensure that we will all be able to remember the good times we’ve enjoyed at this event.
The result? Hundreds of quality photographs, and increased awareness for the event.
Make it open. Just as I encouraged you to publish your hotel photos under the creative commons license, free access is important for spreading the word. Allow anyone to join the group, submit photos, and view existing photos in the group pool. You can always moderate submissions later, but it’s best to begin with open access.
Hold contests. Give away good prizes for the best photos of your hotel. This is a great way to encourage quality content and raise awareness. But make sure to promote your contest: Hotel Casci Florence held a contest to give away 2 free nights, but only one person submitted entries!
Photo credit: Brooke Novak
Related posts:
- Crowdsourcing example: bmi uses Flickr photos in web design
- The 5 Groups To Target In Social Media Marketing
- A Hotel’s Guide to Using Flickr (Things I learned the hard way)
- Can hotels use crowdsourcing?
- Your thoughts on hotels using Facebook (3 examples)
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
By creating two or more flickr group a hotel can be benefited by coming in direct contact with a lot many people. This would directly help in increasing their sales.
Hi Josiah,
For us, at Tiara Hotels & Resorts, Flickr has becomed a very usefull tool, especially for our sales and groups departments. Since we have a profile there, we had more than 1400 views, which is a pretty interesting number.
We’ve recently upgraded to the Premium account, and we will definitely improve our presence there with the inclusion of videos, as well as creating each country hotel collection, that at this moment will be only Portugal (2 hotels) and France (3 hotels).
Cheers
Nuno, I love what you’re doing with Flickr at Tiara Hotels…great photography. Congratulations on the views you’ve attracted so far.
Just wondering, though – what is your video strategy for Flickr? I see you’ve already posted a video there; do you plan to cross-post to YouTube?
I’m sort of torn between the two options. Cross-posting gives more visibility, but keeping videos exclusively on YouTube could result in higher views and popularity.
Hi,
Hi great post and Definitely it will increase hotels’ sales. Thanks for posting
Josiah,
I say cross post the videos. I understand exclusivity, but I think people’s Internet encounters are so haphazard that the things they see in one place, they probably wouldn’t see somewhere else. In other words, at the scale an individual hotel works at, more locations equals more views with little downside.
On Flickr, do you see it primarily as a tool, or a view generator? If a view generator, how does it compare with time spent on other things?
Keith West
http://www.HotelMarketingSeminars.com
Interesting point, Keith.
I see Flickr as a good way to expand a hotel’s web presence. Especially if they are a design-oriented hotel, it’s a great way to show off their style to people looking for ideas.