UAE hotels 'wrongly' fixated on growing a fan-base

The most common and “frustrating” social media question asked by the region’s hotels is ‘how do I increase the number of fans’, according to social media consultant Paul Parsons from Dubai-based digitALL.

“It’s frustrating in a way because there’s no sort of engagement or method of tracking response to gauge how something’s working on the social media channels, hotels only want to know how many new fans they have,” he explained.

Parsons suggested that many hoteliers were missing the point of social media to engage with- and gain valuable insights from their audiences: “Some of the best analytics are built into Facebook and nearly 50% of the hotels don’t use it as a tool.

“You can understand what posts engage with people, what time of the day is best to post, amd what time of the week, what the audience demographics are – all the elements are inside their [the hotels’] Facebook pages but it’s almost like they don’t want to use that. They just want it as a push mechanism which it isn’t meant to be,” he added.

However, Parsons observed that the trend was changing as more hotels in the region became aware of the benefits of social media.

“For a long time, many hoteliers thought social media was a “fad” they hoped would blow over. They were very reluctant to engage with it because of the perceived negative factors of opening up to the public,” said Parsons. “But once they realised it’s going to be said about them whether they are in the domain or not, they saw that they had a fighting chance if they responded.”

“In the last year, hotels are really starting to look at how they can use it [social media] as a communication tool. The hotels that try and look at it as another method of advertising are still a year behind,” he asserted.

One of digitALL’s current clients is Movenpick, which implemented a social media strategy which involved analysis and formation, and standardisation of its social media presence and staff training on the medium across 19 of its regional properties.

“Since we provided the training and implemented the brand alignment, we have managed to duplicate the number of fans our hotels have in the region,” a hotel spokesperson told Hotelier Middle East.

“In terms of ROI, we believe the main purpose of social media is to engage with our fans, to develop ongoing dialogue with our guests and to increase word of mouth,” the spokesperson added.