3 MISTAKES HOTELS MAKE WITH THEIR CONTENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Content is arguably the biggest piece of the social media strategy jigsaw, and mistakes with content strategy is possibly the most common mistake hotels make on social media.
Lots of hotels do a brilliant job of marketing their property on social media. They don’t over-sell, they post correctly, and they depict their hotel beautifully.
However, as with any industry, lots of hotels are not so good at social media. Some hotels even paint their property in a worse light than it actually is.
Social media has a unique power to change the reputation of your hotel amongst people who may not have even visited it.
With that being said, let’s take a look at the three most common content mistakes hotels make.
One: content pillars.
Sometimes, you click on a hotel’s Instagram page, and it’s hard to tell if this is actually a hotel, a restaurant, or something else. There are horrible graphics everywhere, and the only images you see are of food.
Within 10 seconds of scrolling on your hotel’s page, people should be able to identify what your hotel looks like, some of your facilities, and they should be able to develop a general feel of the experience your hotel offers.
Make sure you are posting about: your rooms (in a social-first, lifestyle manner); your facilities; F&B outlet(s); your team (this can be tricky, but posts involving your team members nearly always perform better); and your location (this can help widen the reach of your posts, amongst other advantages).
Another point to mention here, is that boring meeting room pictures, or gym pictures, don’t belong on the Instagram grid, unless there is a specific reason for them to be there. Meeting room posts belong on LinkedIn, and stories plus Facebook are good places to show you have a gym. We do want to sell more meeting room bookings, and showcase your facilities, but there should be some differentiation between what is posted on which channels, to make sure they are optimised correctly for your audiences.
Two: content creation capabilities.
We have worked with hotels of all sizes over the years, and one commonality they all have on social media is the need for new, quality content, consistently.
The very best hotels on social media are creating new content on, at least, a weekly basis. Of course, they will have significant social media budgets which most hotels cannot compete with, but this proves a good point: it is very important to have the capacity to create new, good quality content, consistently, if you want to maximise your social media presence.
All of our social media management for hotels packages include a content creation element (the frequency of which is determined by a hotel’s budget). This gives us the ability to keep the social media fresh, hop on trends, and create seasonal content. It also gives the hotel new professionally-produced images and videos to use in the rest of their marketing.
For example: when Christmas comes around, hotel social media (in most markets) is all about Christmas. It’s the only topic in some countries, and there are endless reels and image possibilities surrounding Christmas in hotels. Posting the same Christmas tree image from previous years is fine-ish, but it hardly wows; so it’s best to arrange a photo or video shoot to ensure you’re posting new, entertaining, relevant content which fits the season.
Let’s say you typically post 3 times per week, and a typical photo or reel shoot captures 30 new images or reels. This means you should aim to have a new shoot every 10 weeks, to ensure you have a stream of new content, consistently.
Whilst that is time consuming, if you’re working with an agency or partner for social media, they should take on most of that burden, so long as you are able to help with the practical internal logistics then cannot tend to.
Three: trends and analytics.
Analytics can not only help you spot trends, but they can help you understand what time and day is best to post at, as well as if there are any trends with hashtags, caption length or style, and other details. Nowadays, AI is helping us understand this data better, too. The analytics available on each social media platform are a good start here, or you can use a third-party analytics tool for a wider understanding.
For a simpler approach, you can visit your own social media pages, and see which posts generated the highest engagements. There will probably be an obvious trend there - as I touched on before, for hotels, it’s often posts where team members are involved.
If you visit the social media pages of the very best in the game (for example, The Dorchester are brilliant, or Moxy Hotels are great in a different industry segment), you will see trends. They post consistently, they observe trends, and they know their target audience. Naturally, those two examples will have high budgets and great content creation capacity, but my point here is to observe the best practices they follow.
Some trends are more obvious: video, or reels, is still the best type of post - at the time of writing, The Dorchester’s last 32 posts in a row were reels - whereas some trends need a bit of a closer analysis.
It is possibly easier to spot the trends of what doesn’t work, rather than what does. For example, when hotels post graphics with a lot of text promoting something, it very rarely gets good engagements (these usually get almost no engagement). If something doesn’t work, take it out of your strategy - at least you experimented with it.
Sometimes, a trend pops up (before it seemingly suddenly disappears). For example, the ‘this or that’ reels which have been common recently, or the below post trend which appeared a few years ago:
When these trends appear, get involved, and do your own version for your hotel (so long as it’s appropriate, of course)!
On an ongoing basis, it’s good to check your analytics and results. You will quickly spot trends and notice what does, and what doesn’t work for you - adjust from there accordingly, and your results will improve.
In summary…
The cliche, ‘content is king’, still rings true in social media marketing. The type of content, the way it’s generated, and where it is posted, are the variables.
We have worked with hotels of all sizes, including most of the major hotel brands and independently-run hotels, worldwide. To arrange a meeting on how we could help develop your hotel’s social media, kindly get in touch here.
Thank you for reading, and we hope you found this useful.