Whether you’re a luxury hotel, boutique hotel, large chain, economical motel or even a hostel, social strategies can help you generate highly targeted traffic and brand awareness, while giving you the tools to communicate information and engage your guests.
These days, hotels are finding more and more creative ways to engage their guests and entice new visitors, in turn creating a sharp distinction between the forward-thinking, social media-active hotels and those who are not.
Here are four hyper-social hotels that are taking their social strategies to another level.
A Full Social Media Experience – The Sol Wave House
The Sol Wave House on Magaluf Beach in Spain is the world’s first “Twitter hotel”. The hotel uses social media to enhance the experience and create community among guests through an app available on the hotel’s WiFi. Once connected guests can communicate with the check-in desk and hotel staff using the #SocialWave hashtag., or see who’s close by and tweet and share photos with each other. Guests can even flirt with each other by sending virtual “kisses” and inviting to meet them at events like #twitterpoolparty and #twitterpartysuites.
Thought Leadership – The Roger Smith Hotel
The Roger Smith Hotel is a 132-room independent hotel in Manhattan that has achieved rock star status in the social media world. The RSH takes social media engagement to a new level, providing discounted rates through twitter, freebies for checking into their bar on Foursquare, and consistently posting compelling and original content on their blog.
The RSH social media team is frequently asked to speak at industry events and they even host many of their own events at the hotel, all the while documenting and sharing everything with their online community, through blog posts, youtube videos, Instagram, and Vimeo.
Social Recruiting – Marriott International
Marriott’s social strategy may very well be one of the best examples of the effectiveness of social media recruiting worldwide.
Marriott’s Facebook recruitment page (with over 1 million Likes) doesn’t just list available jobs; it actively encourages constant engagement and showcases what it’s like to work at a Marriott hotel, through videos and photos. They also occasionally hold question and answer sessions online, moderated by a human resources executive providing insight into the job search.
As part of their recruitment strategy, Marriott actually created a Facebook game that enables users to manage different elements of a Marriott hotel. ‘MyMarriottHotel’ allows players to virtually run their own hotel, hiring and firing employees, delivering food and cleaning rooms. The happier the guests, the higher the points.
The game, available in Spanish, Arabic, French, and Chinese, successfully helped Marriott actively connect with employees in global markets where they were struggling with a lack of talent.
Engaging on International Social Networks – Four Seasons
Four Seasons is by far one of the most engaging luxury hotel chains on social media. From virtual wine tastings on Twitter to active participation in location-based apps such as Foursquare to their highly curated content on YouTube, Four Seasons clearly ‘gets’ social media engagement.
Not only are they actively engaged and creative in their social marketing campaigns and compelling content marketing, but Four Seasons also understands the importance of branching out off our social channels here in the West, and tapping into international sites to connect with the rest of their global community. Four Seasons has an active presence on Sina Weibo, China’s most popular social network (with more than 250 million users) and they’ve even launched an online magazine site there.
