10 ways to get fans on Facebook for your hotel
Facebook, the world’s largest social network with more than 750 million users, has become the centre of attention for many hoteliers that see a great opportunity for their hotel to appear on this resource. Although in the past it was not taken advantage of, the hoteliers now see it as a must.
Just being on facebook is not enough. As well as interacting with the customers that ask questions on the wall, it is important to know how to create a community that will speak about your business and that might even find on facebook a new reservations channel, however, this is not the main aim.
If you think that you do not have enough fans or you would like to have more, to develop your community, try to respond to the next 10 questions and find out if you are doing everything you can.
- 1. Have you suggested the page to your friends?
Within the fan page, in the section “Invite friends.”
- 2. Do you have a customer database for promotional matters and have you invited them by email to become fans?
Take this time to let them know about any current promotion.
- 3. Do you create interesting content and publish fairly frequently?
Go over all the entries in your blog, if you have one, like the relevant content from other sources. Humour and excitement are prone to spread quickly, acting like very effective hooks on social networks.
- 4. Do you make an effort to connect the online and offline world?
Organise events with your customers which brings the social networks into the picture, uploading the photos during the event, providing some benefit or prize to active users of your online communities…and a large et cetera.
- 5. Do you have buttons of the social networks that you participate in on your webpage?
Buttons-link, or “Like” and “Follow us” buttons.
- 6. Do you put the facebook and/or Twitter links as the signature at the bottom of your emails?
- 7. Do you provide the URL of your facebook page on the stationery and promotional material?
- 8. Do you offer some benefit or permanent discount to your customers for using the social networks to carry out an action connected with your business?
- 9. Do you carry out advertisement campaigns on Facebook?
For this, it is advisable to have professional support and advice.
- 10. Do you organise competitions and raffles?
You could build the loyalty, at the same, of your community members. Be sure to use an application that restricts the user from participating without clicking on “I like.”
If you have responded yes to all the questions, you will likely see this reflected in the fairly acceptable number of fans, if not, be patient… remember that it is not so important the size of your community but rather the strength of the bonds between its members.
Hotels and Social Networks: the start of a great friendship
We should not forget that, above all, we buy and sell experiences. Sometimes companies suffer what they call “marketing myopia,” a term used to refer to the mistake of defining our market in terms of the product, instead of the necessity that said product fulfills…
“Nobody wants a ¼ inch drill…what everybody wants are ¼ inch holes in the wall.” Theodore Levitt.
It is the same with social networks. We do not open a facebook account, we accumulate fans and consequently, everyone speaks well of us on the internet and the reservations go through the roof. To create a community that actually gives value to your business, you have to offer some kind of benefit that cannot be achieved elsewhere. With social networks, the customer has more power than ever before. Achieving this cannot happen without having a business approach completely focused on the customer. We are there to listen to you, to learn what satisfies you, what does not, and to create bonds…
Keeping in mind that assumption, today I want to share 7 suggestions to help you be dynamic with the presence of your hotel in the social networks, as a platform for sharing and providing experiences.
1. Put up a sign in the computer or wireless internet connection area of the hotel that includes a “call to action” similar to “Find us on Facebook” or “Follow us on Twitter.” If you offer your customers free wireless internet connection, it will be easier.
2. Use a welcome page, which your users see as soon as they log on that has invitations to keep in contact with the hotel.
● Become our fan on facebook
● Follow us on Twitter.
● Check in on Foursquare.
● Subscribe to our newsletter.
● If you are a minube user, share your experience here.
● If you are a user of …
3. If you have a Twitter account, use it to increase the satisfaction of your customers. Leave some kind gesture in the bedroom if a follower has twitted his arrival to the hotel and take advantage of this resource to increase customer satisfaction during and after their stay in your hotel. Here you can read a great success story.
Twitter is after all a nucleus of opportunities. You can carry out searches for key words related to your business, such as “hotel madrid” or “romantic getaway”…and find countless twitts requesting recommendations.
4. Look for an original way to make your social networks known outside the virtual world, starting with a promotional leaflet, your restaurant menu, or something else fun like these:
Surprise from The Westin Bayshore Hotel in Vancouver to a lecturer with some special little biscuits.
QR Code and facebook on the door of the Tailor Made Hotel.
5. Offer your clients some advantage to make a reservation or become fans: free wireless internet connection, free breakfast, a discount, etc.
One night’s free internet for becoming a fan on facebook.
6. Take a chance and integrate technology into your events. We can see the case of a hotel in Ibiza that made use of RFID technology so that guests shared the event on Facebook. However there is no need to incur a high cost. You can simply make sure that there is a photograph and let the people know that you will upload the photos, and even do it at the same time.
7. Organise competitions to increase your number of potential customers, attracted by a prize, and build their loyalty by giving them awards. In this article you can find out more about competitions.
As you must have already guessed, the majority of these actions can be carried out in your hotel without spending a lot. All that is required is a bit of originality and interest in participating in the conversation. The humour and the game control the tone of the message in the social networks and have the ability to expand quickly. If you have still not ventured into the world of the social media…Take a chance!
Google Hotel Finder: New actor in the soap opera
A new actor will appear on screen, the great promise, Google. It has the potential to stir up the hotel distribution soap and to get the other actors to adapt their roles. Will the audience accept it? Will it change the story or will it just turn out to be another cameo appearance?
This actor has something to offer:
The critics have been talking about its appearance for months. Rumours started a year ago when ITA bought a massive platform that provides it with flight inventory. With this purchase it confirmed its intention to take part in the lucrative series of tourism and that it was going to prepare for the great role in the series: the smart Google Hotel Finder, in this case with hotels (at the moment only for searches in the USA).
Its first appearance on stage has not let anybody down. It remains faithful to its style with a minimalist screen presence which is clear and at the same time looking for that special relation with the audience. At the moment is also totally ads-free. Its character promises you that it will find hotels for you, and that is exactly what it does, with discretion, without any complications and with the speed and agility that have become synonymous with all its previous performances.
Don’t be evil: Will it be the goodie?
Google doesn’t like playing evil roles. “Don’t be evil” is its informal slogan. That’s what it says in its code of conduct. However, it’s got into a series where the characters have totally differing interests but are connected at the same time. How will it translate its good intentions? Will it try to keep everybody happy? Will it just simply fall into its place without shooting anybody or threaten the status quo among the cast? …difficult. To make things even more complicated and adding some excitement, Google already has its own interests, and preserving them will be its own personal challenge: especially Adwords, a very important element of this series.
In the last episode of our soap, the audience was mainly focusing on the torturous love-hate relationship between the two main characters of the latest season: the hotel, eager to get the maximum number of people sleeping with it every night, and the superhero, Booking.com, that also competes wholeheartedly for the love of the client and is more successful at getting it, especially because it manages to get the customer’s loyalty.
Will it ask for commission? Will the hotel end up paying it?
What makes it stand out from the others is hat the Google actor lives off publicity, not off commissions, and what it shows at the moment is the prices as “Ads”. These ads are a new system that Google is testing specifically for hotel prices. At the moment, it only gathers data from the big middlemen, without showing directly the prices of the provider.
The mere fact of charging money for being able to show the price, even if it’s unbiased, it’s not good news for anybody. This situation contributes to perpetuate the eternal system of multiple levels of middlemen, with every one of them asking for their slice of the cake. At that moment the hotel pays Google through the commissions to the middlemen. The innovation of Google Hotel Finder is that it could open the doors to opportunity and hotels could pay directly to be able to display their own pricing. Great opportunity, but at the same time it goes against the possibility that direct sales could be cheaper.
Will it end up as being just a cameo role or will it end up being the leading role?
From its first performance that made of it a star, with the legendary role as search engine, Google has taken on many other roles: some of them have been great successes (Gmail, Adwords, Android, Maps…), others were great flops that it had to let go for lack of audience (Wave, Google Video…).
Google tries everything, its filmography with many small roles is larger than what most people would imagine. Google itself introduces them with Labs.
Will Google Hotel Finder make an impact and consolidate itself, or will it end up as a forgotten curiosity? At the moment, Google has been clever enough to label this new performance as “experiment”, although that doesn’t mean a lot. Gmail spent years as a beta project and when it moved on from this status, not that long ago, it was already one of the main email platforms.
The leading actor up to now… threatened?
Of course, Booking.com appears also in this episode with its price and its link. Booking.com is already a seasoned actor used to perform its best in any scene. In fact, one of the reasons of its popularity is that besides being good in its individual performances (for instance, in the page Booking.com), it also captivates the audience with its cameos in third parties ventures like affiliates or metasearch engines. It wants to be in all the scenes and be victorious with all its superpowers (for instance, with the minimum price, that it obsesses about and it’s making the hotel hate it because it’s taking advantage).
Others compete with similar roles
It’s the group of comparison sites or metasearch engines: they work as a directory for hotels, price comparison websites and they point the audience towards the superhero-middlemen.
It seems as if Google Hotel Finder is not offering the audience anything new than other less important actors hadn’t already tried, like Kayak or Trivago among others. The only significant difference is the prominence that the hotel’s website gets from Google (Kayak did show a link to the hotel, but only if it didn’t have any other source).
Everyone of them displays different styles and nuances, Kayak prefers a lot of information, while Google prefers simplicity and Trivago markets itself through its omnipresent TV trailers, but in essence they are fighting for the same character. Why is it expected of Google to get more attention than the others have got so far? Is it using its brand name to attract the audience?
And our man, the hotel’s website?
The new episode starts with good news: Google seems to want to make friends with the hotel’s website and it gives it a permanent space that won’t go unnoticed by the audience. Let’s hope that those good intentions will be fruitful in the next seasons also displaying the prices. That would be something totally new up to now on stage.
Where are the old stars?
Having in the series such a young and attractive actor as Google reminds us of the leading actors of previous seasons, that disappeared off the stage a while ago: tour operators, GCSs and physical agencies.
We know that they are still successful in summer-cinemas and tourist resorts. They are fighting back and threatening with coming back with successful urban ticket sellers, even with superheroes roles. They seem to be very sure of their superpower: “value added”. However, at the moment the script writers don’t have a space for them. Totally normal: the last episodes have been shot in areas that are totally alien to them. SEO, SEM, social networks…
What can the hotel do?
As you can see, there are more questions than answers about the future of the series, but it hasn’t been written yet and nobody knows what’s happening, At the moment, it’s only present in American screens for hotel searches in that country. It’s expected that it will be released in Europe in the next few months. While we wait for it to arrive, the hotel can prepare itself in two different ways:
- Making sure that it has filled out the information and optimized Google Places, a platform that is being increasingly used to identify and gather information from the companies.
- Thinking about an issue that many hotels find difficult to consider: Direct sales are getting cheaper and cheaper. Google Hotel Finder forces you to think about it again. Is the hotel ready to invest to appear directly paying the same as for appearing through middlemen? Probably, many hotels will comply, however the believe that direct sales carry low costs is cracking up. It’s a totally new mentality.
