How hotels create a lasting performance on Facebook

January 28, 2011 |

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Over a period of three month, NYC's Seventh Art Media tracked the content performance of 75 hotel brands on Facebook to highlight social media strategies that deliver on brand impressions and those that don't. The company identified six key factors for hotels and resorts to take into account in order to see a lasting marketing performance on Facebook.

Facebook surpasses Google in US online traffic, Mark Zuckerberg is Time Magazine's Person of the Year 2010, and Goldman Sachs invests in Facebook at a $50bn valuation - we clearly have arrived in the new Era of Social Media.

As we transition from a search-based to a social media-based online culture, and as consumer attention shifts from paid media to earned media, it is increasingly important for hotels and resorts to focus on the business opportunities that come with the creation of social currency and social capital for their brands. Having a network is easy - getting attention is not.

But hospitality and travel are among those industries and topics that have the natural opportunity to realize strong levels of online community engagement, and as a result, grow their brands and businesses through strategic social media marketing.

This whitepaper presents the results from a comprehensive analysis of basic forms of consumer-generated brand impressions on Facebook relative to (a) content type, (b) community size, and (c) hotel brand status (i.e. chain vs. independent).

Seventh Art Media reviewed 2,492 content posts by 75 hotel brands on their respective Facebook fan pages for the last quarter of 2010 to better understand what type of content generates amplification and engagement.

What they learned is that content strategies for hospitality brands need to take into account a wide range of factors in order to create a lasting performance on Facebook:

- If you don’t plan out your growth strategy for the long-term you might find you’ve built a community of the wrong target market.

- Building engagement is not Facebook’s strong suit. Creating amplification (impressions) is easier and returns a brand’s bottom-line benefits much more quickly.

- Don’t expect your fan page to increase or to sustain amplification rates as it grows, without maintaining a steady flow of the right type of content.

- Most hotel brands show little discipline in reviewing the performance of their pages by repeatedly posting the same under-performing content types.

- While video is a booming engagement tool for other sectors, hospitality is lagging due to poor quality content, subject matter and execution. This is a huge missed opportunity.

- Too much content being posted is ancillary to a brand or property and does nothing to enhance a guest connection. This results in additional missed opportunities.

Download the the whitepaper "Hotel brands and Facebook - identifying the opportunities"