Did you know that YouTube is not only the world’s third most visited website, but attracts more than 800 million unique users every month?
In 2013, every hotel should have at least one professionally created video to showcase its rooms, suites, F&B outlets, and generally let travellers experience the property from the comfort of their armchairs.
From a technical perspective, multi-media content is considerably better at coming up on the top pages of search engines than text-based content, but perhaps even more important, it’s also better for your guests and visitors, because human beings process visual content faster than text and a good video easily breaks through language barriers, too.
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It’s a really good idea to have more than one expertly produced video in your multi-media library and to update videos regularly and if you haven’t got resources in-house to produce professional videos, there are plenty of service providers out there and prices are often very affordable.
You could turn to Dubai-based “The Travelling Shoe”, for example, or support up and coming video and graphic artists like Adam Johnson – both did sterling jobs for my clients in the past at rates that did not break the bank.
It’s a good idea to keep videos shorter than three minutes – anything longer and you’re likely to lose viewers. You can, of course, host video on your own website or on your hotel’s Facebook page, but creating your own channel on YouTube or Vimeo makes it easy for travellers to discover and share your videos.
YouTube may be more suitable if high volume and high exposure are key considerations for your videos, while Vimeo, which is more ‘mobile-friendly’ and currently achieves more than 20 million mobile visits every month, may be the better choice if you’re concerned about brand reputation.
DIY VIDEOS
Don’t fill your channel only with professionally created videos – get out your own video camera or video-enabled mobile phone and get creative! Ask around your departments and teams and you’re bound to discover a budding videographer with a camera and a laptop with editing software (which, again, is very often available for free, if it doesn’t already come with your computer’s operating system).
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