Using Social Media Effectively

No matter who implements your social media strategy, you as a manager, or management team need to understand not only what they are doing, but why, how, and how to measure its performance if you are going to see any type of benefit from the time money and effort that you are putting forth.

Some venues are building their own social media plans.  I have seen effective programs run by hourly employee's, line level managers, department heads, and even hotel executives.  However, for every one I see that is successful, I see many that are not.  Unfortunately of the many failing programs that I see a disturbing percentage of them are being contracted from outside contractors.  In speaking with the hotel and travel managers, they are doing this for a variety of reasons.  First, they don't understand the different channels, or do not feel that they can adequately manage it.  Their management group has contracted for them, or are administrating it for them.  Regardless of who is going to administrate the Social Media, you as managers need to be the final say in the content, strategy, and ultimately the results.

One of the common practices I have seen is that there is no actual strategy that matches to the skills and participants of that media.  For instance, the vendor is aware that to help drive SEO (search engine optimization) you should have a minimum of 3-4 posts per week on facebook.  However, they then use standardized postings across a wide variety of markets.  For example, as most of us know, corporate hotels drive maximum rate for weekday business travelers as one of their revenue management strategies.  But a national marketing support posted on a large number of hotels, "to be sure and contact the hotel directly as opposed to using their hotel branded website as the front desk is authorized to give discounts on stays Monday-Thursday as there is less demand."  Completely, the opposite of the actual hotel strategy.  This post was then re-broadcast across all of the hotels social media platforms.

Another paid service that the many hotels subscribe to is Reputation Management.  For a typical hotel in a small market, they can expect less than 5 online comments per month.  Most of the online review locations offer the option to notify you of all comments and allow you to respond at that time.  For this reputation management service hotels are being charged anywhere from $100-$300 per month per hotel.  Even if you only pay $100 it comes out to $20 per comment that you could get for free with half an hour of setup time.

Given the $100 plus paid for Reputation Management, and another $100 paid for social media comments, the hotel is spending over $200 a month with no appreciable return.  What if you spent the $200 in a social media campaign to drive direct sales?  Or maybe incented $100 to a staff member for creating custom content for  the hotel along with $100 in advertising campaigns?

Now this is a simple plan for a small hotel at a small cost in a small market.  Obviously, you can expand this model, monies, and opportunity to a larger scale.  But the key is to know what the goals are to measure the performance and most importantly, to ensure that your money and opportunity are being used effectively.