Get social media savvy

In the autumn of 2010, when I was still gainfully employed as a hotel manager, I wrote an article about hospitality social media trends for 2011.

I just re-read the article and chuckled when I came across names like “MySpace” and a mention of Facebook passing the 500 million users mark. Welcome to 2012! MySpace is dead and Facebook has more than 800 million users. Google+ amassed more than 90 million users in less than a year.

Hardly a day seems to pass by without us being confronted by newspaper or magazine articles about social media, industry conferences promising to discuss how to develop online marketing or sessions on the best way to utilise web 2.0 tools in our daily operations.

Whether you like it or not, your guests are talking about you on the internet, mentioning your company’s name on Facebook, tweeting about their experience in your restaurant, or blogging about the holiday they booked with you.

In my 2010 article I predicted that social media will get even more social, more and more people will access the internet via mobile devices, location-based services such as Google Places and Foursquare will become increasingly important, and that the line between “offline” and “online” will get progressively more blurred, much like the line between “work time” and “leisure time”.

2012, I hope, will be the year when we learn to look past quantity and begin to really focus on quality when it comes to social media connections. It doesn’t matter whether your hotel or restaurant has 50,000 fans on Facebook and 70,000 followers on Twitter — if 90% of your connections never visit your restaurant or stay in your hotel, you’re wasting your time.

I really don’t care if your Doner joint has 30,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook or not. Tell me what 30,000 fans do for your brand. Do they buy your products? Do they stay in your rooms? Do they refer business to your restaurants and bars? Do they actually engage with your brand, property, or outlet?

Social media, as the name suggests, is not just another form of media — it is “social” — it brings people and brands together. It’s a two-way street and your (potential) guests, visitors, and diners want to be engaged, not simply advertised to, so become part of the conversation and start talking, and more importantly, listening to your followers.

Hotelier Middle East magazine has rightly decided that it is high time for a regular hospitality social media roundup.

Let’s make 2012 more social than 2011, focus on quality interactions rather than mindless number games, look at best practice in hospitality social media, and actually start turning followers into dirhams, riyals, and dollars.

Martin Kubler is the owner, director, and chief cook and bottle washer of Iconsulthotels FZE, an ultra-boutique hospitality consulting firm in Dubai. Email info@iconsulthotels.com or visit the Iconsulhotels Facebook Page at www.facebook.com/iconsulthotels