The easy way to get nowhere in social media!

So you decided it was about time to get serious about promoting your hotel or other tourism business through social media. You already had a page in Facebook, a Twitter account and Instagram for pretty pictures. Needless to say the sixty some likes on Facebook and the hundred or so followers on Twitter have done absolutely nothing for you, probably worse, they made you look like you are asleep or that you don’t really care, although you probably did not yet understood the downside of looking asleep on social media.

The good, the bad and the awful words of social media

Along with the (not so) “easy way” in social media covered in last week’s article, there is also the quest for magic words to get people to stop and look at your message. Being that everyone wants attention, everyone tends to use the same ones, the words they see most often on tweets and Facebook posts, which of course defeats the purpose of being different and being noticed. Rather than searching for catchy and far too often superlative words, how about being engaging and descriptive so that the audience that may be interested in you pauses for a second and clicks to discover what you may have of interest to them. It is then up to you to offer something that is indeed useful or interesting to them. But first, you have to entice them to click you!

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.

Now, destinations can talk with consumers directly

Engage into the conversation!

Social media empowers destinations to reach consumers to open direct conversation channels with them. Yet few are taking the opportunity and use social media in the same way as they do with the Internet: as a window to feature their product in the best possible light. A beautiful picture with a glossy paragraph may get “likes” but few “share” as these PR styled posts do not generate comments or questions because they fail to engage the audience into a conversation. Worse yet, the most glorious paragraphs describing nothing short of paradise are likely to attract even fewer “likes” and only scant “share” as consumers recognize advertising when they see it and no one wants to share advertising with their friends unless they have a strong economic or emotional motivation to do so.