Essential ways to keep the shine on your social strategy

Social media is now part of the travel industry furniture but the task of keeping it clean continues. Ritesh Gupta investigates

Travel brands have cemented their footing in the social media arena but there is growing recognition of the need to be vigilant and nimble in order to stay on top of things. Today’s social media experts acknowledge that this arena brings with itself a unique set of key performance indicators; yes it’s a more engaging channel that can be leveraged for different objectives but it still needs a cohesive approach. Some brands make KPIs all about revenue generation, for others it may also include brand perception and customer engagement.

Other than changes in the social media space itself, executives should be asking questions about the following:

·        Growth: What is driving the growth? For instance, how the reach of your Facebook page is growing? If the rate of growth isn’t up to the mark, then what is letting it down?

·        Engagement: While reach is one critical aspect, one also needs to ensure that consumers are gradually being tilted towards your brand. So how should one look at driving participation and action, let’s say in terms of clicks, likes, comments on Facebook?

·        Content: What sort of posting is clicking with travellers? What time of the day or week works best – is it during the week or over the weekend? There is also a need to segregate the type of content that garners engagement and what works well in terms of reach. As EyeforTravel.com’s latest research shows, consuming content is a primary consumer behaviour on social media and brands are supplying consumers with attractive content to enhance sharability and grow potential contact databases.

·        Optimisation: There is a constant need to ensure that the posting of content and participation is timely across various social media outlets and leverages the whole digital marketing effort.

·        Tailor-made: In the case of global brands, social media teams must be sensitive to the needs of different regions which may have their own ‘social’ culture.  

Top tips

1.   Be authentic: New York-based, Adele Gutman, vice president sales, marketing and revenue at Library Hotel Collection says: “One challenge we grapple with is how to ensure that we are authentic and expressive about exactly what to offer. Nothing will kill your reputation like overstating what you offer so that guests are disappointed when they arrive.” For example, Library Hotel Collection provides lots of photos, floor plans, room sizes, mattress measurements, 360-degree virtual tours, video and so on. Yet we will still have someone say in an online review that they were surprised to find that the ‘Petite Room with one full-sized bed’ was small,” she explains. “We keep working on this the in hope that one day everyone will say they got exactly what was described.

Just two months ago the Library Collection added the phrase: ‘No view. No Tub’ to the description of the Petite room at the Casablanca Hotel. “We received a lot of positive feedback for that level of honesty, and trust is a key component of an excellent reputation that will draw travellers to your hotel like a magnet.”

Top tip: Be honest, avoid negative experiences and negative reviews but be aware you can’t please everybody.

·        Keep it fresh: The everyday challenge with social media is to have fresh and relevant content.

Top Tip: Try seasonal campaigns - it gives the social media manager fresh content every day, while staying relevant in the mind of the user.

·        Stay in control: According to Stephanie Scott, social media specialist at American Airlines: “Each day, we receive content suggestions from across our business. It is incumbent upon the social media team to keep the customer in mind when vetting content.”

Top Tip: Be careful to choose and shape content that will be engaging and valuable for your social audience. In short, it’s important to know when and how to share content, and to be empowered to say ‘no’ to internal stakeholders when the request is inconsistent with the company’s broader social strategy.

·        Integrate your efforts: This aspect is quite commonly discussed, yet various departments still struggle to make social media a part of an integrated marketing effort.

Although marketing means discovering what customers want, tailoring the service with the desired features, and merchandising those services, many hotel structures utilise the marketing department primarily to communicate. “The listening part and the refining the service part is frequently left to operations,” explains Gutman. At Library Collection, operations and marketing work together, listening to their guests via social media and refining the service to generate demand.

According to American Airlines’ Scott, integration of social media across a business is essential to success and has been at the core of American Airlines’ strategy. “A majority of our social content is sourced from various departments across our business,” she says. Her advice goes as follows:

-        Step 1: identify business units with compelling customer stories.

-        Step 2: educate these stakeholders in the value of social media and share best practices.

-        Step 3: encourage them to share their best stories and to collaborate often.

Top Tip: Don’t work in silos and use social media as a real-time focus group.

·        Be instinctive: The American Airlines social media team is careful about staying abreast of the latest trends in social media, so that the team is able to anticipate and/or quickly react to changes. For instance, as rumours swirled about the launch of Google+, the American Airlines social media team developed a plan for establishing a presence on the network even before it happened.

Top Tip: Think ahead

·        Keep listening: Importantly, savvy social media teams have learned the value of listening closely to their customers across social networks, sharing real-time feedback and insights directly with relevant business units and interpreting data to strengthen their social strategy and other aspects of their operations. 

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