Your hotel’s social media presence is more important than ever.
But what if it doesn’t have the right voice? What if it isn’t putting your brand in the best possible light for those who happen to take note of what you say?
Social media is incredibly easy to get wrong as a business. An ill-considered tweet, poorly communicated Facebook message or less than admirable interaction with a follower can cause untold brand damage.
The good news? Social media is actually pretty easy to tame and master – you just need to find the right voice for your hotel and keep developing it as the market and your following matures.
Here’s how.
Write conversationally
Just like blogging, social media content is at its best when it’s conversational. That means no jargon, no use of fancy language and absolutely no sales speak.
The good news is that it means you can simply write like you would talk to someone standing opposite you. In doing so, your hotel’s posts will be far more relatable and interesting (and easier to write!).
If you instead dive into sales mode or start hitting the thesaurus to make your posts sound ultra-smart, you’ll alienate most of your audience.
Don’t resort to click-bait
Social media marketing is about two things: drawing attention to your brand and interacting with your followers. Unfortunately, the former leads many businesses to resort to rather poor tactics.
Click-bait is simply a headline or message which is designed to attract attention, but which rarely delivers on its promise (“you won’t believe what happened to Madonna last week!” – that kinda thing).
Sure, you might gain a few clicks and a bit of engagement by luring people in with dramatic posts, but it won’t do much for your hotel’s brand.
Instead, be truthful, honest and only direct people to your website if you have something that is genuinely valuable to them.
Don’t write about you – write about them
People are interested in your hotel, sure, but they’re probably not that fussed about how many industry awards you have.
Similarly, they probably don’t really care about the owner’s illustrious history as a classic car collector.
This doesn’t make your audience selfish or your hotel’s achievements any less impressive – it’s just the nuts and bolts of marketing.
The more you talk about yourself and your hotel on social media, the less people you’ll engage. If you instead talk about them, you’ll gain their attention and stand a very real chance of turning followers into paying guests.
People want to know what you can do for them; what challenges you can solve, how you can enrich their lives and exactly what difference your hotel will make to their lives.
Talk about those things, and you’ve got their attention.
Make sure you’re consistent across channels
Consistency is important with your social media voice, but not in the way you might expect.
It takes time to develop a voice online and there’s nothing wrong with it changing over time. Therefore, consistency in this case doesn’t refer to the messages you send out each day from now until the end of time; if you need to be more emotive tomorrow than you were today, that’s absolutely fine.
However, when it comes to cross-channel social media marketing, consistency is absolutely key.
The way your hotel speaks on Twitter should be identical to the way it does so on Facebook, Instagram and any other platform. If it isn’t, your brand message will be a confusing mess, and your hotel’s presence online won’t be strong enough.
You don’t have to post the exact same messages across each channel (nor do you have to post to every channel every day), but you do need to ensure the hotel sounds like the same person on each one.
Wrapping up
Final tip: make sure you engage with your audience.
This is for two reasons. Firstly, it’ll help you develop the tone of voice for your social media presence, but, secondly, it’ll show your followers that you care about what they have to say.
Social media takes time, persistence and a great deal of emotional intelligence to get right. Thankfully, the pay-off is absolutely worth it.
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CMS Hospitality holds over 30 years of experience in delivering hospitality software solutions. CMS offers the most complete solution in hospitality software, whether you’re running a hotel, a resort or a hostel. Our highly experienced support and installations team holds a unique understanding of the hospitality industry. We will aim to provide software that suits your property’s needs.
Call us today at (+61) 2 9440 9711, or email us at sales@cmshospitality.com. We will be happy to guide you to the CMS Hospitality solution that’s right for you.