Social Media Dos and Don’ts for Hotels
Managing a successful social media account for a business takes more effort than many people realize. A schedule or calendar must be created along with taking or locating appropriate photos, creating captions, responding to comments, engaging followers, etc. all while juggling normal daily operations. If you are starting a new social media account or simply want to refresh your existing account, we have compiled Social Media Dos and Don’ts to help even the most novice Social Media Manager create amazing social media accounts.
Do
- Be Engaging – When fans or guests like and comment on your posts, reply to them! Taking the time to respond to feedback and comments shows your guests that you care about their opinions.
- Be Genuine – Social Media is a conversational platform, and you should treat it as such. Post authentic content and respond with genuine comments. Do not let your guests think your posts and replies are automated.
- Be Relevant –Relevant content is more attractive to your audience and makes them more likely to engage. In addition, be sure to brand your page and complete all of the information in your profile that a potential customer might need such as your telephone number and website URL.
- Research – Research your audience. Try to discover what they would like to see and what they are most likely to engage with. The best way to do this is to see what content has garnered the most engagement in past posts or to see what posts work best for your competitors. Use reporting features to analyze what platforms and hashtags work best for your brand - perhaps you receive more interaction on your Facebook page than your Twitter account. The more knowledge you have the more you can improve your social media strategy.
- Be Consistent – Consistency matters when building your social media presence. In order to gain new followers, you must post frequently enough to keep your brand seen. Strategic consistency is key. However, you don’t want to flood your followers’ timelines to the extent that they unfollow you.
- Have a Plan – In order to post consistently, you need a social media plan and content calendar. This will help you plan everything in advance, so you aren’t scrambling at the last-minute to create a post for the day. Having a plan also means that you won’t miss important events or holidays.
- Monitor – Monitor all of your social media channels for comments, compliments, or complaints so you can address them as promptly as possible. You can also monitor what is being said about your hotel or brand using keywords and hashtags to find out more information when the hotel isn’t tagged in the post.
- Proofread – If you do only one item on this list, proofreading should be it. Double and triple check your posts before you post them for typos and grammatical errors. These glaring errors can harm your professional reputation.
Don't
- Sell Constantly – Your followers do not want to see you selling your brand, product, or service in every post you create. Make sure you are giving your audience great relevant information in your posts, and then sprinkle in your product/service sparingly.
- Delete – Don’t be tempted to delete all complaints or negative comments about your hotel on your posts. Instead take the opportunity to address the comment, and work to solve the problem professionally. Transparency is highly valued in social communities. Everyone understands that things go wrong sometimes but the manner in which it is handled is key.
- Forget – Social media is ever evolving and requires constant maintenance. Don’t just create your pages and forget them. You must create new and fresh content for your pages weekly, if not daily, and update your profile as needed.
- Plagiarize – This should be a given - give credit where credit is due. Do not pass other’s work as your own. Copying content will cause you to lose credibility and could potentially lead to legal action. You can re-share other’s content as a way to connect with new accounts as long as credit is given.
- Be Controversial – Don’t engage with controversial content. This could be political, social, or anything else you don’t want your brand to be associated with.
- Share Again and Again – If you see something you like, or if you have created great content it’s understandable that you want to share it twice to make sure it is seen. However, it is poor social media etiquette to share the same posts over and over again on the same social platforms. If you need to post about an upcoming event several times, try sharing new images and different captions with each one to keep it fresh!
- Stress about the Numbers – It is very easy to stress about the number of followers on your platform because that is the easiest way to measure growth and impact. However, quality is better than quantity. Many social platforms are inundated with bots and spam accounts, so if you have 10,000 followers on Twitter, but half are spam accounts your social efforts are going to waste. Having fewer numbers of engaged followers means the hard work you are putting in will be seen and appreciated by your followers.
- Think you have to do it all yourself – Hiring an in-house social media specialist or doing social media on your own is not the only option you have. Many hotels choose to outsource their social media to a partner such as iResponze to create and implement a crafted strategy specific to their hotel.
