There can be little doubt that social media is today an integral part of the daily lives of most travel marketers. This is backed up by a recent EyeforTravel survey of 550 travel brands; of those 100% have a Facebook profile and 75% are on Twitter.

By Gina Baillie

But the big question is this: are social media communications really effective or are most Facebook and Twitter updates simply languishing unread? Either way brands need to think very carefully about whether they are engaging via the right social media platforms for their brand.

Indeed in the rush to become ‘social’, many travel brands continue to make fundamental mistakes in their social media communications.   This is perhaps not surprising given the vast array of questions that social media evoke - questions that are not always fully considered. 

Most mistakes seemingly occur in the planning stage with many brands having an inadequate structure in place to be able to listen, engage and respond to their customers.  This becomes further complicated when operating on a global scale with multiple brand pages.

In this three part series we will share top tips on how travel brands can drive meaningful engagement via social media. 

On that note let us examine how to set the right internal structure to ensure optimal social media engagement.

Dedication and structure

At EyeforTravel’s recent Social Media & Mobile Strategies for Travel conference in San Francisco, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International (FRHI), the parent company for Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, Raffles Hotels & Resorts and SwissotelHotels and Resorts,shared how they manage their structure and approach to social media internally. 

This worldwide hotel leader has approximately 100 Facebook pages, 100 Twitter handles, 50 YouTube channels, and hundreds of Foursquare, Google Places and Facebook Places venues.  In 2011, FRHI’s three hotel brands received over 27,000 reviews (not including restaurant reviews).

Hayley Mitchell, FRHI’s Social Media & Community Manager shared that they read all of the reviews but respond to 20 -30% all with personalised notes.

Currently, all of their social media engagement, monitoring, and reporting is done in-house.  When implementing an internal support structure, the challenge FRHI faced was toguide and support more than 100 global property-level social media champions across three brands to follow brand policy and maintain brand consistency, while also allowing them to express regional individuality and creativity.

A dedicated team of social media champions were introduced along with support tools to ensure their success, including:

• A chain of support

• Guidebooks and policies (including guides on how to use each social media channel)

• Weekly/ Monthly/ Quarterly In-Person and conference call communication

• Opt-in internal blog for posting articles, updates, guidelines, tips, FAQs

• Online tools for: Monitoring and Managing Social Media Assets

It was stated that authentic and customised engagement is expected from social media champions with a goal of 24-hour response time to comments, questions and 48 hours for reviews.

Content counts

Joining Mitchell on the session, Jennifer Stafford, Social Media Manager, HomeAwayrevealed how they developed an internal social media policy that enabled them to increase their content publishing by 224% in 2011. Followers increased from 5,000 in January 2010 to 280,000 in January 2011.

Stafford emphasised the importance of exploring different social media communication models before deciding which one would be most suitable in terms of reaching their social media goals. She discovered the following organisational options:

HomeAway decided the final ‘Multiple hub & Spoke’ model would best suit their need of a multiple brand, multiple language approach.

Stafford created a working group whereby PR is the central hub for the following:

• Creating communications policies with the legal team

• Best practices

• Global reporting

• Expertise on the back end for all networks and ad platforms

A question of staff, a question of costs

When it comes to staffing Tarik Qahawish, Director, Digital Marketing & Communications at Aeroplan spoke of the importance of hiring the right community manager.  But it took a while for them to find the right person for the job.  Once in place, however, Aeroplan’s priority was to develop a content calendar and prioritise quality over quantity.   Feedback was gleaned using a monthly dashboard sourced though Radian6and Hootsuite.

Finally there is the dreaded question of cost.   One thing is certain, social media is not free.  It was revealed at the event that some brands spend as much as $60,000 plus on their social media engagement, monitoring and response work.  No wonder the inevitable return-on-investment question keeps coming up.

If you to hear more tune in for EyeforTravel’s free webinar ‘Learn How to Drive Meaningful Engagement via Social Media & Stand Out From the Crowd’on Tuesday 10^th July at 3pm. Speakers inclueLara Solomon, Head of Communications at Responsibletravel.com and Frederick Buhr, VP e-Commerce for RailEurope.

Download the webinar for free here.

Read Part 2: The second article of this series continues by examining top tips to engage your customers via Twitter and Facebook.

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