Many travel brands today focus their social attention on one, two or possibly three platforms but this may not be enough. Pamela Whitby investigates

Does social media deliver a measurable return on investment? Does it matter? For most hard-nosed executives the answer to that question has to be yes. But according to Ed Perry, Senior Director, WorldHotels, if you are still trying to convince your constituents about the return on investment of your social outreach efforts, you may need a change of perspective. “For years, hotel social media professionals have been justifying their worth by measuring engagement through likes, shares, comments, tweets, retweets and hashtags,” he says. “We’ve been concerned with measuring the level of social influence of our followers and have dabbled into sites such as Klout and Kred to make more educated assumptions about clients that have graciously joined our communities.”

So far, what WorldHotels has focused on is enabling people to be advocates of the brand and the message that the brand conveys. Of course, as Perry points out that’s all good and necessary, but some in the industry have, and will still, cast doubts on the overall value of these efforts. In addition, this may not be the right approach today.

Of course, as with everything, it depends on what you are hoping to achieve with social media. Take Ritz Carlton, for example, a hotel brand with just 86 hotels in its portfolio and a relatively small and elite target audience. “For us today it’s 100% about engagement. That’s our only metric,” says Allison Sitch Ritz Carlton Vice President of Global Public Relations. What Ritz Carlton aims to do across all the social networks it has a presence on is to engage people who “truly want to share their love for our brand” wherever they are.

Sitch is also quick to point out that no channel that the company is on leads the customer to transact. “We’ve done plenty of research and I know it’s a broad stroke but most people [their customers] don’t go to social to transact. That’s almost a turnoff,” she says. Another point to note is that Ritz Carlton does not “invest money” in social; all growth has been purely organic. That said, customers can access the brand website ritzcarlton.com via any social channel and that is where transactions occur.

However, as Mike Supple, Director of Social Media at Milestone Internet Marketing points out recently on EyeforTravel.com if you have clearly defined conversion points (like a booking engine on a hotel website) and then use social media campaigns, to drive qualified traffic back to your conversion point it can and does impact revenue.

This is certainly important – and true too - for Perry, who believes times are changing and that advocates of social media will need to convince one another that the most pure value of social outreach in 2014, will be in overall sales potential.

Paying attention to customers

In the context of social media, what does all this really mean? Perry has this to say: “The more you pay attention to consumers via ALL social media channels, the more you will sell. Period.”

Ritz Carlton, which has had a social presence since 2009, has certainly grasped the importance of being on all channels and of paying attention to customers. “We have a presence on ten social networks and we engage differently on each,” says Sitch. On Facebook, for example, its 1.6 million strong audience are customers, so it is here that the brand shares memories of places. The firm’s Twitter audience, on the other hand, is almost entirely B2B. Meanwhile the focus for Instagram is to encourage users to share content – all images on this platform are user generated. The firm is also targeting China by engaging on Sina Weibo and YouKu, its YouTube equivalent and LinkedIn among others.

Interestingly though, Pinterest, which Ritz Carlton uses to create theme boards for different moments in time, is a primary focus for 2014. “Pinterest has been a slow burner but we want to focus on it this year because we don’t think people – ourselves included – are using it properly,” says Sitch.

For Perry, TripAdvisor is another platform that cannot be ignored. As the Cornell Study –The Impact of Social Media on Lodging Performance – shows, there is a clear correlation between an hotel’s high ranking in a city and the property’s chance of success. “Based on the outstanding analytical tool access that our industry has developed over the past year, we are able to access not only TripAdvisor scores, but consumer sentiment across global online review sites and e-commerce platforms,” he says. “It’s what we do with this information that sets us apart as social media professionals, and adds value to the organisations we represent.”

Clearly, the diverse nature of the hospitality business means that how you measure the success of social media depends very much on what you are hoping to achieve. Not everybody will agree, but there is undoubtedly a growing view that social can and does drive sales and 2014 could be the year this is proved.

To hear more in depth insights from Edward Perry, Senior Director, Worldhotels, Allison Sitch Ritz CarltonVice President of Global Public Relations and Mike Supple, Director of Social Media at Milestone Internet Marketingjoin us in San Francisco in March 17-18