By Maiya Wall / Pipeline Social Media
After publishing to your hotel’s social channels, what do you do? Do you release your content out into the world never to return to it again? If your answer is yes, you are missing out on key insights and engagement opportunities.
In this article, we list 5 things you should do after each and every posting to ensure you are engaging your fans, refining your social media strategy, and ultimately turning online interactions into more bookings. The conversation between your hotel and guests begins before they arrive! Implement these 5 steps to make sure you are starting that conversation well.
5 Things to Do After Publishing to Social Media
- Check Your Grammar
- Stick Around
- Confirm If Your Paid Promotions are Accurate
- Check If It Did Well or Not and Assess Why
- Decide When You Need to Recycle the Content
1 – Check Your Grammar
In our article, 8 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Publishing to Social Media, you’ll notice that checking your grammar is also the first point. We are firm believers in triple checking. The simple fact is—spell checkers fail and people make mistakes. We still recommend that you add the Grammarly extension to your browser, but always read over your post one last time after publishing it. I can’t tell you how many times I do this and catch one or two things that need adjusting.
2 – Stick Around
After posting, don’t just log out and move on with your day. Whenever possible, stick around for 5-10 minutes or pay close attention to your notifications so you can engage with early responders. This is especially important if your posts ask for feedback or are about a booking special, event, or amenity that you expect people will have questions about. Having small gaps in your response time is okay, but people are expecting a faster response in this digital age. What you don’t want is to see an important comment 8 hours later that you could have responded to quickly.
This could be a comment like “Can I get help with booking a stay with this special this weekend,” to “We loved every minute of our anniversary trip, and we are returning for our anniversary again next month!” In either case, the fan will appreciate your prompt response because it shows that you care and that your hotel staff is helpful before they even step foot in your hotel. Take a look at the comment section of some of your posts. Does the same standard of hospitality that you hold to at the hotel extend to your hotel’s social channels? Responding promptly and kindly will show fans that your staff is welcoming and willing to go above and beyond to ensure a good stay.
3 – Do You Promote Your Posts? Make Sure They Are Actually Boosting
Do you invest in Facebook or Instagram advertising? Get in the habit of double-checking if your promotional posts are actually running and spending the right amount of money. One careless click and you’re spending $200 instead of the $20 you budgeted for. That’s not all that could go wrong. Unbeknownst to you, after publishing your post the ad could be disapproved by Facebook and won’t even be running. Our team has had Facebook disapprove ads that are nowhere close to being discriminatory or misleading, but we have to be there to catch it and request a manual review.
We also recommend ensuring that your post topic will make sense for the entire time that it will be promoted to your fans. For example, if you are promoting a special that expires at the end of the week, make sure that the boost doesn’t extend into the weekend. Or, if you are boosting about a one-day holiday, make sure the boost spends the money all in one day.
4 – Check If It Did Well or Not and Assess Why
Not every post will do amazing. But there is still much to learn from your not-so-good posts! It happens to the best of us—You compose a facebook post thinking that it will get a ton of comments & shares only to get a couple of likes. Duds like these are an important component in figuring out your hotel’s social strategy. The next day after posting, evaluate in native insights by viewing and noting the post topic, date & time posted, and content details like whether it was a photo or video. We manage hotel social media accounts that thrive on user-generated images and that is what we focus on. Another account may thrive on local events if it’s in a big event-based city.
Eventually, you will see a pattern emerge and you’ll begin to work out what kind of posts your fans are and aren’t interested in. Now, this takes time and experimentation! We aren’t saying to never retry things that may not have worked well in the past. Flukes happen, audiences change, and the way we use each platform changes. This is just a helpful strategy that will help you build consistent engagement and learn more about your fans.
5 – Decide When You Need to Recycle the Content
Repetition is your friend! If your post did amazing, plan to post the same concept again. For example, if you posted a balcony shot that overlooks your city that got a lot of engagement, consider sharing a new balcony post every Friday. Or maybe you have an ongoing event in your hotel restaurant that always gets comments in which people tag their friends; be sure to post about this event consistently. Find new ways to present the same popular content.
Our team uses project management software called Asana to keep our ideas straight. We recommend this powerful tool for organizing & planning your content. However, a regular paper or digital calendar can work just as well. Get started with one of these systems to stay on top of your posting schedule.
The main point is that there is no need to reinvent the wheel every time you post to social media. Figure out what your fans respond well to and repeat the concept. This will help you keep your strategy consistent. Plus, you have to remember that not everyone will see your post after you publish. It may feel like you are talking about the same things over and over, but you want to make sure that you are reaching as many people as possible—especially if the post topic is time-sensitive.
Conclusion
If you want to get the most value from your digital marketing efforts, you or whoever is running your hotel’s social channels must pay close attention to post-performance. This approach will give you clarity on what you should be posting about and if your social media strategy is working for you. Do you need help with improving your post quality and creating a strategy that will drum up more interest about your hotel? The Pipeline team would be happy to help!
