When I ask hoteliers what their goals are for any given Social Media campaign, undoubtedly I still get the answer “I want to be in the top listing on Trip Advisor”, or “I want 10,000 Facebook Fans, or Twitter followers” While this is at a minimum very unrealistic for any new campaign, it is not the mindset that is going to generate business or increase customer loyalty. The point I always try to clearly explain is this, Social Media is not necessarily a numbers game, it is more contingent on the quality of the fans, followers and reviews you have on your respective sites. Let’s start with Trip Advisor. If you have 100 reviews, but they all have negative effects in them, you could be number one all you want, it won’t get anyone in your doors, in fact it will drive them strait to a neighboring property. Looking at Facebook, if you have 10,000 fans, but none of them ever visit your page or interact on the page it is a big waste of everyones time. For a time not so far back, there were a lot of people buying Facebook fans to pump up their profiles.While this was a waste of money, it was also useless as these fans (supposing they were active profiles) were most likely never going to stay at your property, much lesscheck out specials, leave comments and suggest updates they would like to see. So what is the correct way to find fans, followers, likes or good reviews that will help increase bookings, and generate customer loyalty. The first thing I tell clients may seem so obvious and commonplace, but it is the staple of any quality hotel. CUSTOMER SERVICE speaks for itself, treat your guest right, go the extra mile by embedding this into your corporate culture and training programs, and your customers will move mountains for you. I did a survey awhile back that addressed the common misconception of customers only writing reviews when a negative experience occurred. I found the opposite, and current statistics will tell you the same. “ The vast majority of consumers who post online reviews are overwhelmingly motivated by goodwill and positive sentiment”, according to survey conducted by the Keller Fay Group, which surveyed some 1,300 online reviewers. (Keller Fay, 2012) If you are positive your customer has had a good experience, make sure your front desk agents are asking your guests to go online and write a review on Tripadvisor. Make certain to print your Facebook and Twitter page url on the bottom of their settlement, and reward them for posting their experience on these two sites. Encourage them to book directly through your fan page as most hotels now have special packages directly bookable via Facebook, which are only available to fans. Use location based features, and offer a free meal to the guest who checks in via Facebook places or any other location feature such as Foursquare the most often that month. Facebook now has a feature that let’s a guest check into an event, as well which then shows up on the users timeline for all of their friends to see. Jet Blue has done an amazing job by offering fans who check in frequent flier miles.
Source