Social media is an indispensable part of the everyday communication strategy for organizations across the globe. It?s often seen as the heart of any marketing campaign. In the past decade, a massive change in communication has taken place. Social media has revolutionized how people share information and their opinions.
Businesses are now equipped with the ability to connect with their customers on the go. Businesses can reach out to new customers with the latest products and services more conveniently.

These days, hoteliers and restaurateurs are busy sharing content and running campaigns about their services and are learning to leverage social media to drive growth in all areas.

Here are the top ways that hotels are benefitting from social media.

  1. Monitor Audience Behavior with Social Media
    Hoteliers today realize that the key to successfully know and engage the audience is by staying in constant touch through various social media platforms. Hoteliers can review their audience?s behavior and even fill their social feeds with posts from their customers via user generated content campaigns.

But monitoring audience behavior can be even more powerful. Social media provides the opportunity to run highly engaged and targeted campaigns and later monitor their responsiveness towards the offer.? With tools like Facebook Insights in Hootsuite, hoteliers can learn a variety of valuable information about their audience, including dominant languages spoken, age, hobbies and gender. This knowledge can help cater campaigns and product offers to the target audience, while giving a higher ROI.

  1. Improved Customer Relationship Management

Evaluating the success of social media campaigns is a must. Similarly, hotels must evaluate how they are making use of social media data to better serve customers. Digital communication channel traffic reveals what new customers enjoyed about their recent stay at the hotel as well as what they disliked about it. It?s up to hotels to make the best use of this information.

Digital channel communication also encourages greater transparency in receiving consumer responses on an ongoing basis and helps tackle them effectively. The results are that businesses within the hospitality industry can readily engage with consumers. Hoteliers are wise to update their products or services with quick improvements that have big pay offs in the long-term. A lot of hoteliers today are looking up to analytics service providers to tell the effectiveness of various digital channels and attribute the ROI to each using multi-channel attribution modeling.

  1. Increasing Brand Awareness

Smart social media marketers know that social campaigns aren?t just about immediate wins, like increased sales. Social media should also be leveraged to build ongoing relationships with your customers and the audience at large.

Social media platforms are impactful communication channels that can be used for continuous brand management. The same customer who booked your hotel because of a social media marketing campaign could later complain about the experience on the very same platform. Community managers can instantly address the customer and provide an immediate solution. A high level of service on social media turns dissatisfied customers into influencers rather than detractors. Hotels can transform enthusiastic customers into extensions of their marketing team.

  1. More Traffic on Branded Websites and Travel Aggregators

One of the best benefits of social media for business is using it to increase your website traffic. The offers and promotions that are run on social channels can be used to direct traffic to your website or to travel aggregators where the audience can complete a booking. Not only does social media help direct the audience to your website, but it helps increase search rankings. Google now includes social shares as a large part of its search ranking algorithm, so that the more social media shares you receive, the higher your search ranking will be.

Ultimately, social media has enormous sway with customers of any industry, but the hospitality industry has an even greater opportunity for customer engagement. Who doesn?t want to see vacation pics every now and then? Regardless of the target market, social platforms empower hoteliers to share the right information at the right time. Brands can truly make their mark online. When truly harnessed, social media has the power to help hoteliers gain insight into their customers, improve the customer experience, and reach new audiences.

Authored by Surendra Yadav, Manager- CRM Consulting & Analytics

 

Related Absolutdata Products & Services: Marketing AnalyticsCustomer Analytics

Stay up to date with all our latest resources, blog posts, and news.