Social Media
Don’t Forget To Be Social: Increasing Your Hotel’s Social Media Shares
Every business wants to drive as much traffic as possible to its online platforms, not least hotels. One of the ways to achieve this is to ensure posts on social media platforms (often linking to relevant content elsewhere online; for instance, on your hotel site) are shared by multiple people. How can you do that? Well, don’t fret; here are some tactics, tools and tricks you can try…
Images and video – they’re irresistible
Getting shares on social media of your site’s content is fundamentally all about driving traffic to the site, raising its conversions and bringing more bookings and visitors to your hotel. So how does sharing pictures and videos fit into this? Well, it’s simple; social media messages containing images or multimedia often result is better click-through. And the reason for this is that they naturally and quickly attract users and are faster and easier to consume than text; our eyes and brains are hotwired to devour images and – by extension – video. So be sure to share imagery that’s not just high-quality, but also relevant to the content your messages link to.
Recognise your audiences
A critical component of your hotel social media strategy – in fact, arguably its cornerstone – should be to make sure you’re uploading the right sort of content to the right social media platform. You shouldn’t have a one-size-fits-all approach; different content works better for different audiences. To wit:
- Facebook – users’ networks often comprise friends and family, thus they’ll usually share personally/ emotionally resonant content
- Twitter – content here is regularly consumed and shared according to trend
- LinkedIn – informed product content and professional/ leadership-themed content works best here
- Pinterest – great for consumer-related content sharing; large female user base
- Google+ – popular with the tech-savvy crowd; post and share content relative to this audience
Help users to help you – make sharing easy
When you think about it, not many people are genuinely likely to share your content if it requires real effort to do so. After all, one of the reasons social media’s so popular is its ease-of-use. In which case, you have to induce sharing behaviour among users by making sure social-sharing buttons are included on your site’s pages and clear to see. Also, bear in mind screen-optimisation (for when your site’s accessed not just on a PC but on a smartphone/ tablet as well) – the sharing buttons must be easy to find and use whatever the screen size.
When’s your target audience most active?
Finally, you should consider when the specific social media audience you’re wishing to target with (and share) your content is most active before posting. There’s no point taking the time and effort to connect with them when they’re all asleep! Posting during peak hours then won’t just likely result in more meaningful social engagement but naturally generate more shares.
