Resorts and hotels: your office hours are wrong!

Can you answer that?

If you want more overseas guests, then change your office hours and keep your social media awake at night. Don’t be asleep when they are awake, looking at your property and but asleep when you reply, that’s 24 hours to lose the booking. Answer now and the odds are even better in the middle of the night to get that booking as they are going to be really impressed that you have staff on deck at 3 in the morning. Makes you look great!

You can do this without hiring more staff. Train, promote and empower your front desk night shift and put them to work in social media and marketing. In fact, you should have your best and brightest staff on the night shift, the ones who can give the right answer and make the right decision without referring to a manager. These are your future managers proving their abilities. Set up a system to insure that there is always someone on social media duty throughout the day, night and weekend. At one hotel, the staff has a small koala bear with a clip which is clipped to the screen of whoever handles social media now. When that employee goes off duty, the little bear must be moved and clipped to someone else's screen, so it moves around the back office, the front desk, even the GM's desk through the week and there is never any gap of coverage.

Social Media is now; all day, all night

Businesses attuned to social media know very well that response time is now, not in a few hours or tomorrow. For hotels and resorts it is a problem as their generating markets are often several time zones away and marketing needs to be open for business on their clock,often around the clock. Using apps to schedule tweets to Twitter at the best possible time in the target market is really useless and even damaging if there is no one on hand and ready to respond to replies.

JetBlue gets great positive exposure from its social media presence and capacity to not only respond to queries, tweets and posts, but for being proactive to help solve individual problems. Every time they help one customer on Twitter, they get thousands or tens of thousands other people to see that they help that one person. You can't buy that kind of positive exposure through advertising.

See "How JetBlue's Social Media Strategy Took Flight"

Don't just reply. Take the opportunity to help on the spot

When someone tweets or post a question or a problem, don't point them to a web page or an e-mail address, handle it right now by taking on the issue and resolve it. If it involves personal information, move the conversation to a private channel, voice or chat, and stay on it until a happy conclusion is reached. If there is no way to solve the issue immediately, then give the manager's name, with e-mail address and phone number, who will be calling to reach a resolution and arrange a time for that to happen. It may be a simple booking request that would be quicker and easier to complete on your web site, but that's not the point. Even if it takes up more time than it should, you have gained much more than a customer, you have potentially reached into his network with a story that makes you look good which is invaluable to your image.

Engage, participate, contribute.

You will get that back in multiples. To get responses, you have to be engaging, informative or entertaining. There is no need to pitch your property every moment, it is best not to if you want to keep your followers. Tweet or post interesting content that has somewhat of a connection with what you do or where you are, or would be useful to your audience. Say you are a resort in Thailand, your subjects are going to be Thailand or travel of course, but also maybe about health and fitness that relates to healthy eating or outdoor activity, about using bank cards or phones abroad as it is of interest to your prospective guests. Don't be afraid to talk about bad things as long as you have a positive twist or offer a solution. You can promote and advertise, but like good seasoning don't over do it. If someone finds you interesting, it is much more effective that it is their action that leads them to look you up rather than you shoving it under their nose.