GMs are responsible for their hotel’s reputation. How do you use social media to help you build this?
Heinrich: Social media is a wonderful tool to be in touch with your guests and build the reputation for your brand. Utilise your hotel’s USPs and let them tell a story. Create human interest stories. Exploit the physical attributes of your product to the fullest. In short, be creative and involve the whole team in the process. Today anything goes and one has to try many different angles to create interest.
Mark: We have to embrace social media and accept the fact that in today’s world, information is readily available instantly via the net. In April of last year we hired a community manager as we realised we needed a dedicated resource to manage our online strategy. What we have found, particularly over the last 12 months, is that the consumer has realised the power of social media and how to leverage it — this has resulted in some ‘sensational reviews’ providing a very one-sided view of a guest experience that is often exaggerated with selected facts.
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Social media does, however, provide an amazing platform to directly target potential guests for special events and promotions. Our community manager and event partners use many social media platforms to effectively promote an event, and now we have even started forecasting expected turnouts based on ‘likes’ and other information we receive via these mediums.
Serge: Reputation management will be really important for the hotel industry in upcoming years. Considering there are millions of reviews written each day across a plethora of different platforms, the world wide web has the power of influencing one’s decision making process; being able to manage your business reputation will determine success or failure.
Social media and mobile already live in symbiosis and we will only continue to see them merge over the course of this year.
Mobile activity has allowed social media to live in real time by allowing users to create updates, tag friends and check in on their mobile devices. Smartphones represent 50% of new mobile devices being purchased and the growth of connected devices will only continue to rise.
Ericsson estimates that there will be over 50 billion connected devices in circulation by 2020, including laptops, tablets and smartphones.
In North America, 2014 will mark the first year that online access is greater from mobile devices than a desktop or laptop. Keeping an eye out for authentic ways to make use of emerging social/mobile applications will be of great value for hotels.
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