All hospitality organisations use social media to promote their business. However, social media at times look like a more casual and recreational method of driving business growth. In this article, we have outlined a few steps and tips on using social media effectively to drive hospitality business growth.
As a hotelier to hospitality business owner, have you realised the potential of the social media marketing concept? There are multiple platforms to explore in order to promote your business idea and get endorsed. Trust me you need to start from the start and you can’t leave social media optimisation for later.
Whether you manage a hotel or own a restaurant or any other hospitality establishment, it’s crucial to get your act together as far as social media optimisation is concerned. Social media marketing along with email marketing is one of the essential hospitality marketing tools. Here are some of the useful tips to get started:
1. Know the Key social media platforms for promotion and branding
The social media mediums most common to start with are:
- Youtube
- Blogs
- Tumbler
and the list goes on.
If you are still thinking that you do not need an official Facebook page or a Twitter account to support your business, maybe you are like many others who fail to realise the creativity that goes into social media marketing.
If you do not have a social media presence on the Internet, you are missing out on a lot of innovative ideas for your hospitality business growth. Social media is not just for teens and millennials.
Businesses might get wary of the fact that there are a lot of fake user profiles managed by software. However, this is a small tradeoff for such large numbers.
To set the scene, here is an infographic by Sproutsocial to help you realise the potential of social media on driving brand recognition.
2. Use Social media as a source of new ideas and innovation
A lot of businesses promote news and innovative business ideas through Twitter. A lot of crowdfunding projects are happening on Twitter. Businesses are selling everything from physical products to webinars on Twitter. ‘Twitter Business’ provides more information on how to use it as one of the innovative ideas for business growth.
A lot of groups on popular social media platforms promote and revolve around top hospitality innovation. Facebook, the brainchild of two innovative college students, has evolved into a multi-million dollar business. It is one of the most innovative and fastest-growing businesses globally. There are ample opportunities to follow your competition on Facebook to know in real-time on what new projects and growth strategies are being undertaken by them.
Are you utilising the potential of LinkedIn to draw potential customers into your business? LinkedIn is not just a directory of people looking for jobs.
LinkedIn offers innovation in the field of hiring and recruiting, placing thousands of options at your fingertips. Additionally, forums specific to your area of business offer innovative ideas for your business through interaction with professionals in your field. The LinkedIn community is a creative group that fosters innovation. So build up your company page and get started on promoting your innovative business idea on LinkedIn.
3. Drive more traffic to your website through Social Media
If we speak about social media tips, it would be incomplete without discussing the advantages of the same regarding the possibility of driving insane traffic to your money site. Getting guests to new hotels or a new restaurant might always not be simple.
Similarly promoting new services, offers, seasonal schemes night also be extremely challenging.
It is in these cases that social media promotion would be most rewarding.
Did you know that you have the opportunity to promote your product on Pinterest? You must already be promoting on Instagram. Tools like Instagram Story Maker from Adobe can help you come up with free images for Instagram stories. Use the tools and more to make the social media posts compelling and catchy.
Potential clients seek out your product through special interest boards. All you have to do is get creative and set up boards that relate to the business. Pinterest images are ranked higher by Google and thus driving a lot of traffic. Pinterest is a social media platform that is highly under-utilised by hospitality organisation.
These social media platforms provide you with a lot of traffic and that too relevant within your niche. To get additional traffic.
- Post regularly on social media platforms.
- Interact with existing and potential customers.
- Run Facebook ad for greater visibility and better brand management
- Use Google Adwords for attracting the right match for your business.
- Use LinkedIn advertisements for reaching out to the desired target market.
- Create lovely images and pin them on Pinterest for visibility to your new products or services.
- Create videos and promote them on your YouTube channel.
4. Use Analytics of your social media platform to understand customers
A lot of social media platforms provide free analytics. These are crucial insights as they can help you understand your existing and potential customers.
Use Facebook analytics to compare and make improvements in your plan. LinkedIn has decent analytics as well.
You might already be using Google Analytics which is a great tool by the way.
Social media automation websites like Buffer have extremely robust analytics as well.
5. Use technology to automate a lot of social media activities
Automation holds the key to success in the current technology era. Hospitality organisations use technology right from customer-facing solutions like checkin-checkout at hotels to Point of sales system.
Technology is being used to drive down costs and improve customer service.
A lot of solutions like Buffer can dramatically reduce social media promotion efforts. There are other social media marketing websites and tools to help automate a lot of tasks.
Another great method to build a following and generate traffic is automated email marketing.
Did you know that there are automated email programs that generate a response to certain actions on your website? When someone signs up and agrees to receive emails from you, let your creativity shine with automated email programs like Mailchimp, Aweber and other similar programs.
Conclusion
If you are not using it already start using social media to save costs and increase profit. It is absolutely necessary for all hospitality organisations to be actively promoting their services on social media. Hopefully, these tips about using social media for business growth would be useful for all hospitality organisations.
Do you have a blog for your website? Many businesses fail to incorporate a personal feel to their website by dismissing the impact of a regular blog. A blog is great for presenting new products and innovative business ideas. It is a great way to make your customers feel like they are a part of your business.
Use the below to keep your blog active and lively and see your business grow:
- News updates
- Industry updates
- Tips and unique insights into products
- How your office looks have been changing
- Freebies
- Promotional offers and campaigns
There are free platforms for blogging like WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger to help you get started in minutes with blogging.
So, its time to get actively involved in promoting your services on social media. Using them better than your competitors would mean better reach to the customers and enhanced brand visibility.
