SOCIAL MEDIA: Five reasons to start blogging today

These days, it sometimes seems like every hotel, restaurant, bar, and fast food joint in the Middle East is on Facebook and Twitter. Facebook pages range from the awesome (e.g. facebook.com/InterContinentalDubaiFestivalCity ) to the ‘not bad at all’ (e.g. facebook.com/table9dubai), to the plain ridiculous (e.g. facebook.com/doner.kebab.dubai).

Blogs, on the other hand, appear to be mostly neglected by companies in our part of the world. Compared to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, blogging is a bit like potion lessons in Harry Potter’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry: “There will be no foolish wand-waving or silly incantations in this class”.

As such, I don't expect many of you to appreciate the subtle science and exact art that is blogging. However, for those select few, who possess the predisposition... I can teach you how to tell the story of your hotel or restaurant and create guest and customer interactions.

I can tell you how to get to know your business better, achieve hyper-focused and hyper-targeted segmentation of your company’s different buyer ‘personas’, and even considerably help with your search engine optimisation efforts and generate referrals to your website.”

A blog, in other words, should be an essential part of your social and digital marketing strategies and generally sits very well between your more ‘casual’ social media platforms like your Facebook page and your more corporate internet outposts like your official website.

Here are five compelling reasons to get started today:
1. Setting up a blog is (relatively) cheap and quick: Most blogging software is available free of charge, e.g. Wordpress, Blogger, Tumblr, and can easily be installed on your web server or you can choose a ‘cloud hosted’ solution.

All these services come with a large number of customisable themes, which allow you to quickly change the style of your blog to fit in with your overall corporate design guidelines.

2. Blogging regularly will make search engines fall in love with you: By and large, search engines love fresh content. You probably won’t update your website every week (bar changing the room pricing, perhaps), because it’s generally a hassle and often involves web-designers or getting to grips with your site’s content management system.

Updating a blog, in contrast, is very quick and poses no major technical challenges (if you can use Microsoft Word, you can post a blog post on most major blogging platforms). An hour a week is all it takes to provide Google and co. with fresh content and make it easier for internet users to find out more about your hotel, restaurants or bar.

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3. Blogs allow you to tell longer stories: Twitter, but also Facebook and many other social media platforms, are geared towards frequent, but short, updates. A picture here, a bit of text there. Blogs allow you to tell longer stories and seamlessly supplement them with pictures or videos, however.

For example, you could post a video of your chef preparing his favourite dish, make the recipe available for your readers to download, and then also provide them with a link to your restaurant’s website for direct bookings, all in one easy blog post. Remember: People tell stories. Your company has people, including you. People buy from people.

4. Get a better feel for your operations: Blogging allows you to get a better feel than ever as to what your guests and customers do and do not care about. As you study your blog’s analytics, social shares, and comment sections, you’ll see what users are interested in as well as the topics that don’t seem to have much impact. Think of it as market research on the sly.

5. Segmentation: All your guests are different, i.e. you don’t just sell to one type of guest or customer. Blogs allow you to be hyper-focused and target all your different customer segments. Every blog post can be uniquely tailored to appeal to a particular segment of your company’s target audience.

Blogs also allow you to react very fast to events in your local market. You can post about your latest community initiative, bar offers, or room packages, and it will be featured on the main search engines in a matter of hours. Combine this with the power of keywords and you’ve got excellent tools to both open up new markets and also to engage with your existing audiences.

On the downside, however, maintaining a good business blog is not quite as easy as running a simple Facebook page or Twitter account. The quality of the writing really matters on a blog — you don’t want to lose your readers half-way through your latest post, after all, you want them to read it all and then click-through to your website.

Blogging can be a lot of fun — ask around your teams and departments and you might just discover some hidden talent and unearth team-members who appreciate the subtle art of writing good copy and displaying it online for your readers.

Whatever you do: Keep it social!fIVE 

About the Author:
Martin Kubler is owner, director and chief cook and bottle washer of Iconsulthotels FZE, an ultra-boutique hospitality consultancy in Dubai.
Email: info@iconsulthotels.com or visit facebook.com/iconsulthotels