Since the day of its inception, social media has taken the world by storm by having the global audience at one place. Each and every industry has been in the social media periphery for their promotion, but apart from promotion there is one more important thing and i.e. networking. The application of social media in hotel industry has been immeasurable and the reach has been worldwide.
Choice – Choice of the location is the most important aspect in hotel booking because social media is used to explore locations. An expert study has stated that, before heading to the place people usually head to the social media sites to excavate the sight and the hotel. The list of hotels venturing into the social media platforms is never ending. The small, medium and large hotels each of them are now present in social media. Reports have suggested that finding about a hotel and exploring is not tougher as social media has made it easy to explore them.
Reviews – What do you do when you find a hotel has a rating of 2 stars? You preferably ignore that and head to a hotel which has 3 or above stars to its name. This phenomenon is called choosing the best over the rest and how does this happen? That is only because of reviews. Reviews are an essential part which contributes in making or breaking the hotel reputation. The medium of letting your reviews talk for you happens through social media where numerous reviews are given to selected hotels based on their hospitality and service.
Booking Engine – Most hotels have a hotel booking engine attached to their website but a new kind of booking engine has surfaced over the last 1 year or so and is known as social media hotel booking engine. Though not very much popular among the masses but is an option when it comes to extracting revenue from hotel booking engine.
The percentage share of social media booking engine is 0.7% of the total bookings, while 70% of the bookings come directly from the book now option present in the website and the OTAs. B&Bs account for most of the revenues because they are the ones installing the booking engines. Due to the social media’s global presence the hotel booking engine is slowly catching up.
Promotional strategies – The conversion percentage of hotels using social media promotional strategies is around 80% which means when you advertise something the probability of it reaching the audience is 80/100. The reach is expected to increase by 50% of the normal visitors and so promotional strategies are a big plus while taking social media into account. Different social media platforms are used for different purposes like Facebook and Twitter are used for brand promotion using texts and images, pinterest and Instagram are used for brand promotion using info-graphic. In order to build a relationship with customers and clients, social media is definitely the viable option for promotion.
