Facebook (social networking )
What it offers: Facebook is all about “transitive trust” — reaching people through other people, and helping your fans to tell their friends about you and any offers you may have.
How it might help you: Facebook is the number one social media platform in terms of number of users, so its reach is appealing. Additionally, Facebook has also been adding more and more features lately that expand the options you have for communicating your messages to a wide audience.
Levels of time commitment: As there are so many different elements on a good Facebook page, it can take quite a bit of time to run one effectively. Among other things, you will want to include status updates, event announcements, photo albums, videos, discussions, special offers and more. Facebook is becoming an increasingly interactive multimedia platform and that requires more time than some other social media options.
Good for: Building a fan base around your brand, since people are able to use many types of media
Not so good for: Mass messaging -- reaching everyone at once.
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Blogging (information sharing)
What it offers: Blogs offer a convenient publishing platform for publishing content online.
How it might help you: Once content is published through your blog, it can be syndicated easily to nearly every other social media network. It has the ability to quickly raise visibility in the social networks, and also in search engines.
Levels of time commitment: Running an effective blog usually requires significant levels of time commitment. The posts don’t have to be long, but they need to be planned ahead of time and fairly frequent. Usually between one and three updates per week is required for you to stay relevant.
Good for: Hotels that understand and embrace the concept of content marketing, and are willing to make the commitment over the long-term to stick with this channel of communication .
Not so good for: Hotels that likes to try something for a few weeks only, and cannot commit to a long-term participation.
Twitter (microblogging)
What it offers: real-time communication.
How it might help you: Twitter is a great listening tool for engaging real-time sentiment among your target audience. When used carefully, it can also be effective for time sensitive offers: selling room inventory that will be worthless tomorrow.
Levels of time commitment: Usually not much, it’s more of a frequency issue. It’s best if you can manage to check in several times each day for five to10 minutes.
Good for: Hotels with empowered staff who are able to spontaneously respond to and serve your online audience.
Not so good for: Hotels that have lengthy content approval processes. Because of the real-time nature of Twitter, if it takes a few days to get an update approved by management, the right moment for a response has passed. You need someone who is able to respond and resolve situations within minutes.
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