By: Maiya Wall
Pipeline LIVE is a Facebook live series covering topics such as social media trends, digital marketing best practices, content creation & planning, social media advertising, blogging, and SEO. These 15-minute videos are full of resources that will help your hotel learn the ropes of digital marketing.
In the latest episode of Pipeline LIVE, Senior Community Manager Maiya Wall discusses how businesses can spring clean their social media channels. She also covers the importance of evaluating marketing strategy and how businesses can easily find content inspiration weekly. Watch the episode and continue reading to learn how you can implement the information into your hotel’s social media strategy.
1. How can I spring clean my hotel’s online presence?
With the first quarter of 2019 behind us, it’s the perfect time to take a good look at your hotel’s digital marketing efforts. Have they worked? What hasn’t worked? Before you can effectively evaluate your strategy, you must make time to get your social media house back in order.
We’ve created this helpful Social Media Spring Cleaning Checklist to get you started. Refer to this checklist while you work on tidying up your social channels and resist the urge to act on ideas you may have in the moment. Focus on getting everything up to date—this means making sure all your reviews and messages have been responded to, updating cover photos & bios, and reviewing settings. After you’ve cleared out your digital clutter, move on to reviewing native insights on your social channels and evaluating the effectiveness of your campaigns and posts.
Things to consider while reviewing insights:
- What are the best & worst times for posting? View this article to learn how to find the best times to post to Facebook.
- Which posts did well? What were they about? When & where was it posted?
- Which posts did the worst? What were they about? When & where was it posted?
- Which post got the most comments, likes, and shares?
- How consistent was your posting schedule?
- Have your page likes or followers increased over the past 3 months? Decreased?
- Have your reviews been increasingly positive or negative?
- What posts/campaigns did you especially enjoy? Are there opportunities to repeat?
Our checklist includes guidance for Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We recommend building on our checklist to include any additional channels you may have and give them the same treatment.
2. What should I do after my social media accounts are in order?
After you’ve organized and made note of what strategies are effective and which are ineffective, it’s time to think back to ideas you had planned to implement that have not panned out. For example, did you intend to run a contest or begin a new channel in this first quarter and didn’t? It’s time to review the goals you previously set and decide if you will still incorporate those and how to proceed. Below are some additional content ideas to consider.
Content Ideas:
- Look for outstanding reviews and turn them into posts.
- Take an idea that worked well in the past, refresh it, and recycle it.
- Create posts focused on your staff – life milestones, awards, reviews that highlight when they went above and beyond to take care of guests, celebrating holidays, and having fun on the job.
- Run a contest centered around receiving feedback on your hotel. Fans could enter the contest by leaving a comment on what made their stay memorable. You’ll see a lot of engagement on this type of post, and afterwards you’ll be able to use that feedback to improve guest experience and/or think of new post topics.
- Take a look at what others in the hospitality industry are posting about. What is working for them might work for you.
- Try a feature that you have never tried. For example, an Instagram Story sticker.
- Try themed posts that you repeat weekly. For example, every Monday you could post a different drink photo from your hotel bar and include information about Happy Hour.
3. How can I easily and consistently find content inspiration?
Inspiration is fickle. It doesn’t always show up when you want it to. Instead of being at its mercy, you or whoever is managing your hotel’s social presence should set aside time every week dedicated to solely finding ideas (or researching) vs. content creation. Below are some ideas to get you started.
- Look through past comments on posts to mine for FAQs that you could turn into post topics.
- Review what’s worked for you in the past. Ask yourself how you could refresh and repurpose.
- Evaluate what bigger brands or hotels are doing and figure out how to replicate that topic or technique.
- Search for events happening near your hotel including harder to find ones that newbies to your city might not discover.
- Read social media articles from our blog, Social Media Examiner, and Social Media Today.
- Review tags, mentions, and check-ins to find user-generated images to feature. Be sure to comment to the poster letting them know that you loved their photo and want to feature it!
- Search your location or city on Instagram to see what’s going on in the area and what other hotels and businesses are posting.
- Look for additional relevant hashtags to work into your Instagram posts.
- Follow five new people who post great content relevant to your hotel’s location or interest on Instagram and Twitter.
Final Thoughts
As a digital marketing agency, we recognize how easy it is to focus on content creation instead of taking the time to pause and evaluate your efforts. The goal of encouraging you to conduct some spring cleaning on your hotel’s social media channels is to make sure you spend your time and energy well! Download our Social Media Spring Cleaning Checklist and take the time to thoroughly look over everything—even if you don’t think you need to. We believe this exercise will help you find mistakes you might be blind to, think of new content ideas, and see your hotel’s social channels with fresh eyes.
If you have a certain digital marketing topic that you would like us to cover in the next Pipeline LIVE, reach out to us!
