Hotel Blogging Best Practices, Part 3: Engaging Your Readers

This is part 3 of my hotel blogging best practices series.  You can read part 1 here, and part 2 here.

Establishing a dialogue with your readers is one of the best reasons for having a hotel blog.  Effective blogging is more than posting new entries; it is facilitating communication between the reader and you – and between the reader and others.

Get the discussion started with these techniques:

Reader engagement strategy #1: Ask your readers questions

Initiate the discussion by asking your readers questions at the end of blog posts.  This can be on implementing the ideas you shared, or asking for your readers’ experience and opinion on them.

Reader engagement strategy #2: Participate in the discussion in the comments section

As your blog grows in popularity, you may reach the point where there are dozens of comments on your entries.  Make sure you interact with the people leaving the comments.  Thank people leaving comments for the first time.  Answer questions.  Address criticism.  Try to develop the conversation further.

Reader engagement strategy #3: Facilitate social bookmarking

Social bookmarking and sharing services provide the potential for your blog to attract a lot more visitors.  If you’re posting interesting, unique content, readers will want to save and share what they’ve found.  Make this easy for them by adding social bookmarking links to your blog.

The most popular social bookmarking services include del.icio.us and Digg.  At the bottom of this blog entry, you’ll see links to save the article on those sites.  (I use Sociable, a free WordPress plugin.)  ShareThis is another good tool to help with content distribution.

The bottom line is this: by encouraging communication with and between your readers, you’ll develop more loyal supporters of your brand.  Whether your goal is to promote your hotel or a destination, building a group of customer evangelists is invaluable.

So let me ask you this: how do you engage your blog readers?