Embracing Social Media in Hospitality (part 2 of 2)

An interview with Martin Kubler

as appearing in Hotelier Indonesia Magazine

www.hotelier-indonesia.com

Martin's contact details follow at end of the interview

We are pleased to present Part 2 in Martin Kubler’s series on Embracing Social Media in Hospitality.  The first part appeared in the January-February issue of Hotelier Indonesia.

[HIC]  How can Twitter benefit hotels?

[MK]  Twitter, a “microblogging” platform, is experiencing a phenomenal adoption curve worldwide and is increasingly being used by individuals and businesses to communicate with each other. It is free to use with a relatively low impact on resources and has the potential to deliver many benefits for hotels.

When it comes to Twitter, I would advice hotel to spend more time listening to their followers and other Twitter users than talking to them. Don’t get me wrong, of course you should talk to people on Twitter (and other platforms!) – engage them, keep them up-to-date, ask & answer questions, and occasionally have a laugh with them; yet it’s listening that will let you find new sales leads and convert online chatter into offline business.

By consistently monitoring Twitter and searching for suitable keywords, which can be done easily with freely available tools such as Twilerts or Hootsuite, hotels can spot potential business leads.

People increasingly use Twitter to ask for recommendations or advise, e.g. hotel or restaurant recommendations. As Twitter streams are public by default, it is easy for hotels to join the conversation and engage users. As you can see from the example here, it is possible to get people to book with you via Twitter and, often, you don’t even need to invest a lot of time. What it does take, though, is speed. Twitter is a very fast medium and you need to reply to tweets speedily – the early bird catches the worm!

[HIC]  Can Social Media be used to unload excess inventory or last-minute capacity?

[MK]  Indeed. As Social Media is very fast, it is a good medium to use for last-minute sales campaigns. In order to do so successfully via their own social media platforms, hotels should have enough quality connections & followers in order to reach a critical mass of people. When selling room inventory through social media, remember that you’ll be saving the OTA commission, so you can pass on some of the saving to your fans by offering very competitive rates. To ensure that your offers are seen, your messages should contain strong calls to action, e.g. “Book before 5 p.m. today and get 30% off!” or “The first 11 people to book before 3 p.m. today will receive X% discount!” If you don’t want to or cannot offer rate discounts, you could consider including “value added services” such as breakfast, Internet, airport pick-up/drop-off, or offer room upgrades. You can also use Social Media to sell F&B, of course – if you have low-demand days/periods in your outlets, why not use platforms like Facebook or Twitter for distribution of special deals information & vouchers? Try and put out different deals for each platform/site – it makes your connections or followers on these sites more valued as they feel that they are receiving an “exclusive” offer. Don’t forget that services like Google Places or Foursquare allow you to put out time- and area-limited offers (see also below), i.e. you can control the duration of a promotion and ensure it targets the right audience.

Another option is to create members-only Facebook groups or other communities, i.e. outside the public eye (people need a password to access the info or need to be otherwise approved before), for people interested in special rates and offers. A hotel could use such platforms to advertise offers to an interested audience at any time. This also works well to engage better with members of the travel trade – a closed (i.e. membership by approval only) Facebook group for travel trade professional I created for a hotel in the UAE attracted several hundred members very quickly and is still growing. It’s an excellent platform to “talk shop” outside the public eye and to communicate special deals and booking incentives.

[HIC]  What about hotel concierges and Social Media?

[MK]  I’m a big fan of hotel concierges using Social Media and especially Twitter or location-based services such as Foursquare. Although some hotels have started to get their concierges onto Social Media platforms, there is still a lot of potential. Not only can concierges provide “virtual” assistance to guests via Twitter before, during, and after their time on property, but they can also use social media to show-case local attractions and services. That way, guests get an immediate idea of what to once they’re in the hotel. Hotel concierges could even run blogs with tourist suggestions or travel tips. The Hotel Rival in Stockholm, Sweden, is a good example of this. Their blog is called “The Stockholm Tourist” (http://stockholmtourist.blogspot.com/). A blog is also a great way of driving more traffic to your hotel’s website, e.g. if you are searching for ideas of what to do in Stockholm, you are very likely to come across the Hotel Rival’s blog and, as a result, check out their hotel website, too. Blogs are cheap to establish, easy to update, and also very search engine friendly.

[HIC] Can hotels use location-based (geolocation) services be used to engage with guests?

[MK] Location-based services such as Foursquare, Google’s Latitude & Places, and Facebook Places are a very good way to engage with guests and visitors. Not only do they allow for time-limited promotion of special offers to a geographically well defined audience, e.g. you can target people that are already in the vicinity of your property, but they also often give you access to users Twitter names or other options to contact users directly. At any given time, it is easy & quick to find out which users have “checked in”, i.e. who is in your hotel or outlet and it only takes a little longer to send them a tweet to say “hello” or tell them about today’s special offers. Even after a guest or restaurant patron has left, he or she can be engaged by the hotel, e.g. a hotel could ask how a guest’s stay was and, if the guest’s reply is positive, “push” the guest to leave a review for the hotel on, say, TripAdvisor.

If there are well-known landmarks or tourist attractions near your hotel, there is nothing to stop you from leaving helpful info on the Foursquare, Google Places, or Facebook Places listings of such sites, e.g. Foursquare users checking into a popular office building near one of my clients’ properties are greeted with a message saying “While you’re in the area, why not pop across the road to [venue name] and try our lunch buffet?” – at the same time, the venue in question offers a special offer for first-time visitors that gives them 15% discount on their total bill.

Hotelier Indonesia would like to thank Martin Kubler for his contributions to our publication.  Martin can be reached at: 

Email:   martin@iconsulthotels.com

Web:  www.iconsulthotels.com

Blog:  martinkubler.com/270669/

Facebook:  www.facebook.com/iconsulthotels

Twitter:  twitter.com/#!/iconsulthotels