rrcmh: Importance of Social Media in the Hospitality industry

We all know that social media is a big hit right now and it is taking more and more important place in brand and marketing strategy.

Conversation prism

Meet the very colorfull converstion prism that lists all the social media site that exists and classify them by different categories. What is more important to see is that in the center, the eye of the hurricane, we have the brand and the more we go towards the outer sides of the eye we have the different strategies, approaches to reach the brand's target. Once the latter defined we have the a list if different social media sites that can be used in order to interact with the target. As we can see on the prism there are multiple ways to intereact with a hotel's guest, we need to define what exactly we need to communicate to the client in order to decide on the social media profile.

In order to better understand how well social media and strategy marry together we'll analyze the following article showing the Complicated relationship between social media and hotel's revenue strategy. According to the article and Jason Lee, Senior Director of online product and technology for Travel Media Group, social media is as effective in the begging in the customer journey as in the middle. 45% of travellers encounter social media in the very begging of their booking journey and another 45 % get to know the social media profile of the hotel in the middle of their journey for example during the pre-stay. Only 11% of travellers engage on social media on the end of their journey meaning post-stay. Most of the times people go post-stay on social media profiles to share their experience and unfortunately a customer tends to share a bad experience more often than a good one.
We'll have a practical look using Planeterra foundation mobile site. They have the first place on Google Search list. On their mobile website we have easy an easy scroll down option and at the end of the welcome page we have the social media profiles the organization has. One clic on the profile we are interested and we are being redirected to the social media page. Planeterra is present on the major social media sucha as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.
On-the-go mobile users experience should be very interactive and easy to see. A suggestion for Planeterra is to put the social media icons on the begging, the top of their site in order to see them easily because an user can simply close the site when they are not able to find on-the-go.