Social Media “Listening” Tools for Hotels

If you’ve been keeping your ears open, you’ve probably heard that 76% of U.S. travelers now share their travel experiences on social networks. This is according to a survey by the world’s largest travel site, TripAdvisor. These shares include photos, status updates, check-ins, and reviews. Hoteliers should be aware of all these conversations happening regarding their properties for instant, honest feedback. By simply listening, they can take appropriate action to correct a problem if necessary, or thank a happy guest for a positive comment. Both of these are great first steps in building loyalty with your guests.

The thought of tracking all of these shares across multiple networks can be daunting: how can one hotelier possibly keep up? There is no question that there should be a designated marketing team at any hotel that wants to succeed. There are pros and cons to hiring in-house or an outside agency, which we wrote about in a post earlier this year.

Regardless of how your hotel marketing is managed, you’ll need to take advantage of specific tools available. These tools will help you to effectively listen to all the conversations out there going on about your hotel. The good news is that there are many tools out there specifically to help you monitor tweets, Facebook posts, and photo shares. Below I will share three of the best free tools I know of specifically for listening.

1. Google Alerts: Anyone in business knows that it’s a good idea to set Google Alerts. You can pick specific keywords to monitor to research a sector, industry, or competitor, or your hotel. You can receive daily, weekly, or minute-by-minute alerts of the keyword to keep abreast of new trends, blogs, and mentions.
2. Hootsuite: This tool is widely known as one of the best out there for managing multiple social media platforms. What you might not know though is that you can also use Hootsuite to keep track of all the mentions of your hotel on Twitter, and in some cases, Facebook. There is a “Mentions” tab in Hootsuite that keeps track of every time your hotel’s Twitter account is mentioned in one stream. You can also create a “Keyword Tracking Stream” in Hootsuite that functions very similarly to Google Alerts.
3. SocialMention: This is a social media search engine that you can use to research conversations about your hotel. The tool searches blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging sites like Twitter to provide metrics around keywords, including a positive or negative measure of “sentiment.”

These three tools will get you off to a great start monitoring conversations going on in the social space about your hotel. Are there any great tools I missed?