Social Media Marketing Tips for Hotels

Social media is a powerful tool for hotels. It allows you to share your story, build loyalty, and drive bookings. There are so many options out there that it's easy to get overwhelmed with all the choices, so you should focus on channel growth and posting the right content for your target audience.

With the right strategy, you can use social media marketing to your advantage and authentically connect with new customers. Here are some social media marketing tips for hotels to help you get more engagement and potential new guests.

Social Media Marketing Guide for Hotels

Before you start marketing your hotel on social media, you’ll want to look at several channels, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, and more. Where does your audience like to hang out online? What brands and interests do your target audiences like?

As you build content for your hotel, remember to keep your creatives cohesive with your brand. These social media marketing tips for hotels will help you develop a marketing strategy to reach the right people as they’re looking for properties like yours.

1. Create Target Guest Profiles

You should know your target customers so well that you have profiles for your top customers. Audience insights, email marketing data, sales data, and previous customer purchase decisions can help you find key customer profiles. Once you know your customers, you can start building audience personas to find more groups on social media who are most likely to purchase your products.

The first step to social media marketing for hotels is understanding your target audience. If you don't know who these people are, how can you possibly know what kind of content they will be interested in? It's important to take a deeper look into the market demographics in which you operate and ensure that everyone understands who their customers are.

The key is understanding how your customers spend time online and how their journey to purchase begins. This is called discovery.

Once you understand who they are, knowing what channels are most important to each group is important. Perhaps, it’s Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, or Instagram. These are the most popular platforms and offer various ways to post content or advertise.

Set Up Your Social Media Profiles‍

In addition, you’ll want to ensure that your business has a profile on every relevant social profile to these audiences.

These profiles are important so that they can tag your business when someone posts something related specifically to your "hotel" or even just "travel" related topics/hashtags related to your location or brand. You can also search these hashtags and comment on posts for more visibility.

Social media marketing is beneficial because you can instantly connect to your audience. Hotel owners can use this opportunity to reach out directly with information regarding potential bookings through those channels instead of relying solely upon traditional advertising methods such as print advertisements or radio spots because those methods don't allow us enough flexibility when trying hard-sell techniques like booking specials. These online specials on social media can lead to faster bookings.

2. Know Where to Invest

Social media can be a great way to reach your target audience, but when it comes to hotels, social media marketing is best used as a supplement to your website and other online content. You’ll want to invest in new blogs, infographics, hotel graphics, events, and other pages to link to on social media.

You shouldn’t just post about your hotel or resort; make sure you're posting relevant information that will appeal to people in the area, too.

As you invest time into your content strategy on social media, you can develop a content calendar. In addition to information and events at your hotel, you should also share photos of the surrounding area and events in town that might interest visitors. It’s important to tag your posts with location and hotel information and vacation keywords that your audience uses and follows.

3. Use SEO Effectively

The best way to use SEO tactics on social media is by creating relevant posts for your audience and then using the right keywords and hashtags in those posts.

Google uses keywords to determine the relevancy of a search query and will help boost your post's ranking on Google searches. If the user clicks on a link with keywords related to their search terms, they will likely stay engaged with your content longer and may make an additional purchase or lead generation request.

The best way to find out what keywords people are searching for is by using tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs' Keyword Difficulty Tool (both free).

You should also include hashtags in your Facebook posts—a hashtag is simply another way of saying "keyword." Still, instead of being typed out normally (like this), you type it out with pound signs (#) at the beginning and end so that users know exactly what you're talking about when they see it.

4. Optimize for Mobile

You should always optimize your profiles, graphics, and videos for mobile. Today, most people use their phones to access the internet. That’s why it’s important that your site is mobile-friendly and provides a great user experience on the go.

However, it’s important that your site and any pages connected to it are responsive to mobile visitors. Most social media users use their phones, so any social campaign will bring mobile visitors to your website.

For example, you can use responsive design so that your site looks good no matter what device or browser someone uses to access it. You should also test your site with different browsers and devices to ensure there are no bugs or performance issues when viewed on diverse devices and screen sizes (for example, desktop vs. tablet vs. mobile phone).

You can use tools like Google's Mobile-Friendly Test to check how well your hotel's online presence performs on a smartphone or tablet.

5. Create a Social Media Strategy

One of the best ways to grow your social media presence is to develop a strategy that considers your channels, audience, and content. It can help you synchronize your profile, graphics, videos, ads, and overall messaging into a cohesive plan to achieve your goal. Implementing these social media marketing tips for hotels will help you get the most bang for your buck.

A social media strategy is a written document that outlines the goals of your hotel’s social media campaign, and it should be flexible. For example, you may want to bring in more leads for a particular location or drive new guest leads with summer package deals.

Your hotel may have multiple objectives for each platform, so you need to consider the different types of content (text, images, and video) that will help you reach those goals. A well-thought-out strategy will also help your team understand their roles.

A successful social media strategy doesn’t just document what you want to do. It provides clear instructions on how to do it. The best strategies are easy enough for anyone on your team to understand and help launch.

If they can’t read them without getting confused or intimidated by all the buzzwords thrown around by marketing professionals, they won’t follow them.

6. Start with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter

If you’re unsure what channels to start with, many hotels use one or more of these channels: Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter.

At a minimum, every hotel should have Facebook and Instagram profiles. This is helpful when guests are looking for social trust scores as they start planning their vacation, but it’s also beneficial when they want to check in and look at more information about the area.

Your voice and image on these profiles must match your overall brand identity and strategy. Some brands have distinctive voices and goals for certain channels, however. For example, some hotels use Twitter for customer service.

7. Use Video and Visuals Heavily

Video is one of the best ways to make your hotel stand out. Not only does it help you tell your brand story, but it provides a great way to show off the best features of your property.

You can use videos to showcase your hotel’s location and amenities, provide information about upcoming events, or just give people a taste of what an amazing experience they can have if they book with you.

In addition to using video for promotion purposes, don't forget that visual content is important too! Whether it's photos or graphics illustrating amenities or services at your hotel—or even just fun facts about where it's located—visuals are easy for potential guests to learn more about what makes it unique.

8. Encourage User-Generated Content (UGC)

User-generated content (UGC) is a big part of social media, and you can use it to your advantage.

One way to do this is by encouraging guests to share their experiences with hashtags and other tools on social media. You can also create contests where users submit photos of them at the hotel or videos for prizes and recognition.

You must be sharing UGC on your own channels, too, so people can see how much fun they would have at your hotel if they stayed there. You should tag the original creator when re-posting UGC on your hotel’s channel.

9. Test Multiple Creative Formats

After developing your content strategy and posting more on social media, your hotel can start testing different creative formats and use analytics to see what works best. You might be surprised by the results! Potential guests may like videos of the hotel, or maybe they love seeing the surrounding areas and visitor guides.

Get Started With These Social Media Marketing Tips for Hotels Today!

Today, social media marketing for hotels is more important than ever, and to be successful, you need to know the basics. Your property must be on social media because that’s where your guests are. If you're not attracting people with engaging content and a strong presence, your comp set will win over potential customers.

If you're already doing social media well, keep up the good work! If not—or if you've never tried—use these tips to get your hotel's social media strategy off to a good start.

Social media can be a powerful channel for hotels to reach out to their guests and potential customers. Creating a strategy and investing in social media is important, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Start simple by using the most popular channels with your target audience, and then work your way up from there.

How Can We Help

Marketing and promoting your property on social media requires lots of work, especially if you need help writing posts, messaging, graphic design, videos, and advertising. If you’re searching for small business marketing near me and need help, get in touch with the pros at E-Marketing Associates today!

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