Social media has been a boon for retail product sales because items can be of interest to people at any time, but the same principle is not true for h
By Neil Salerno – hotel marketing coach
There have been a torrent of articles and webinars extolling the virtues of social media for hotels.
Social media is certainly applicable for hotel franchise brand-building, but this writer is still unconvinced about the marketing value of social media for individual hotels.
Social media has been a boon for retail product sales because items can be of interest to people at any time, but the same principle is not true for hotels.
Interest is the key. Few people have any interest in a particular hotel unless it happens to be where they are travelling or planning an event.
The exception is travel-oriented social media, like TripAdvisor, which is a viable tool to promote individual hotels because consumers can search comments about the specific hotel in which they have an interest at the time.
Third-party endorsement of products and services has always been a powerful sales tool.
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There was a time when most hotels sought the coveted stars and diamonds of AAA and Mobil to demonstrate their value to travellers.
Today, travel-oriented social media has intensified hotel endorsement by providing traveller user-generated comments to guide the hotel selection process.
This is powerful marketing.
Take advantage of this powerful sales tool
Until now, guest comments were primarily used to measure the effectiveness of a hotel's operation and as a guide for evaluating hotel management.
The public forum provided by travel social media gives hotels an opportunity to use guest-experience comments for marketing purposes as well.
One of the very best tactics is to place the TripAdvisor Widget directly on your website.
Oh, I know what you're thinking “some of those comments are negative”.
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