Thursday, March 3, 2011

Not long ago hoteliers around the world would rely on their website in order to attract web traffic but things have changed a lot during recent times. With the advent with social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube it is becoming increasingly important for hotels to be present on these platforms.

Twitter

Twitter has grown exponentially during recent years and has become a formidable marketing tool. At the moment it is estimated that there is around 200m people that use twitter regularly. At first many marketers viewed Twitter as being irrelevant as a marketing channel but if used properly Twitter can be very useful. One of the beauties of Twitter and most social media in general is that it will allow you to interact with your potential clients and stakeholders easily. Questions and complaints can be answered easily and remedial actions taken promptly. By using the search tools, proper hashtags and other relevant tools you can effectively find out what your clients think of you and your competitors. This can really help you when it comes to online marketing research and allow you to better understand your clients and hence give them what they are looking for.
Just as with traditional email marketing, Twitter provides an interesting way to create a list of potential clients for your service. This can be new clients or customers that have already been at your hotel and will like to stay in touch with what is happening with their favorite place.

Facebook

Facebook has evolved a lot from being the playground for students to become something more heterogeneous in terms of users. At the same time business pages have also evolved in order to allow marketers to make better use of the service. Below you will find some interesting ways on how you could best use Facebook as a marketing channel.

It is rare to find someone that does not possess a Facebook account nowadays and it might be a good opportunity for you to reinforce your brand by using this medium. Whether it is past clients or potential clients they will all want to find out what is happening at your hotel.

Just as with Twitter, Facebook will allow you to receive feedback and complaints from clients. This will allow you to take corrective actions as soon as possible.
You can also purchase ads on Facebook in order to drive traffic to your main website or your Facebook page. The interesting thing is that these ads can be targeted to some particular target market based on interest and demographics.
Youtube

Youtube is another medium that carries some interesting potential. People spend a lot of time nowadays on Youtube and it might be important for you to consider getting a piece of the cake. Moreover people are keen to share videos on Facebook and other social media sites and this can help you make the most of viral marketing.
You can make use of Youtube to provide some high quality presentation of your hotel. Your potential clients may have a better understanding of your infrastructure and also the standard of the service that they should expect.
The power of Youtube video lies in its ability to go viral. If done properly a video can be viewed by millions of viewers thus allowing you to boost your brand. However you should make sure that your videos are done professionally and not something made on a Sunday afternoon. It needs to be creative in order to get viral.
Make sure that your video is tagged correctly before submitting it to Youtube. Indeed viewers make use of tags in order to find videos and this will allow your videos to be found. Additionaly you should also make sure that you make use of proper titles in order to be found by the search engines.
Social media are interesting ways for you to get traffic and potential clients. However you will need to learn how to best use these modern tools if you want these tactics to work.
Source: Travelwires

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