4 Ways Hotels use Social Hubs to Engage Guests

In the hospitality industry, guest experience is key. With more and more guests starting to share their experiences on social media, good or bad, hotels recognize the user-generated content as opportunities to leverage for lead generation, marketing, and guest engagement. Your traditional methods of looking and extracting content would take too long, let alone require technical expertise.

So how can hotels get the guests to keep driving positive content creation throughout the guests' stay?  This is where social hubs and social walls come in! A social hub/wall is an aggregation of multiple social media feeds into one page, that can be then displayed on any marketing channel. After working with many hotel clients at TrueLoyal, here are 4 ways hotels use social hubs to market and engage their guests!

1. Display User-Generated Content on Screens

Social walls on a centrally located display screen throughout lobbies or each individual guest rooms enable hotels to promote their guests' photos/tweets! For example, hotels can display a social hub with all their guests checkin photos from Instagram or tweets of their experiences to get new guests excited. Guests would love to contribute to get their 15 seconds of fame on the screen! As more content comes in from your guests, you as a hotel now have a lot of content to leverage for future marketing materials. Win-win scenario.

Four Seasons Dallas utilized social walls in their lobby for their 4th of July festivities and saw enormous engagement.  Their hotel received over 243,000 social impressions, 153 guest generated posts, and a reach of a little under 100,000 and in a three day period.  In addition, they added 58 new Instagram followers.

Another neat implementation we have seen are hotels (with multiple locations around the world) telling guests to capture their best photo of their experience at the hotel and tag to a specific hotel location. The entries will all be displayed in the check-in counter and the best one could win a free night stay.

The result? A social wall of all your guests around the world checking into your hotels, sharing beautiful photos, that will be sure to excite new customers checking in. This is a perfect dynamic addition to the static clocks many hotels have behind their checkin counters, showing the time at the hotel locations around the world.

2. Increase Conversions on Websites with Authentic Social Content

Potential guests are not only researching online before they book, but are also heavily influenced by reviews and recommendations. Hotels can take advantage of social walls to drive traffic by aggregating positive social posts about their location and brand right next to the reservation page. Using social hubs, your hotel can aggregate your own branded Facebook Page to keep your visitors up to date with the latest news/discounts directly on your site or even positive Instagram hashtagged photos (like displayed below) and display them on your site, or better yet, your checkout page. The result? Increase in conversions as you are leveraging authentic, genuine content directly from your previous customers. Your customers respect authenticity and transparency.

This is also beneficial for your guests because the relevant information is up-to-date and right where they need it so the guest does not need to search.  If you want to be more creative, you can display content can contain virtual tours from your own Pinterest board, Twitter hashtags from events around the city, and much more! Leveraging social content on your site and presenting it to your guests when they are in the purchasing phase will increase conversions for you.

3. Monetize via Events and Sponsored Content

Aside from just increasing social engagement and conversions, social walls can help hotels generate direct revenue in 2 ways. First, hotels can offer social walls to event hosts as an additional service during conferences, events, weddings, parties, fundraisers, and corporate meetings.  The social wall can be shown by a projector, put onto a monitor, or even displayed on a jumbotron. Event hosts will love this because this gives their attendees a social experience, and themselves an aggregate view of how the event turned out.

Second, hotels can sell ad space inside their social wall to display sponsored content from local businesses. Since your social hub will be grabbing a lot of eyeball time from guests, the local theme park down the street may want some of that attention. Your hotel can insert custom sponsored content that displays a happy family photo spending their day at the theme park! By selling sponsored posts to city tour companies, the ballet, or five star restaurants, your hotel can generate additional revenue and see immediate ROI. Speaking of social ROI, we saved the best for last-- read on to the last use case!

4. Generate More Online Bookings with Guest Photos and a Call to Action

The path can be long and tedious for a potential customer to go from seeing content to making a reservation. That's why social walls can enable hotels to add a “Book Now” call to action button on each social media post to increase conversion and online bookings.  Less clicks for the guest means a higher chance of booking. We call this monetizing your social media (from your user-generated content), and see the result below. All you need to do is aggregate your guests' Instagram/Twitter hashtagged photos, add a custom "Book Now!" call-to-action button that leads visitors to the checkout page, and implement it on your site prominently for maximum conversions.

With word of mouth and social recommendations being shared all around the social web today, it can be very powerful to leverage all that content into a social hub. Using it correctly can lead to strong marketing and engagement opportunities. Social walls are becoming the strongest form of genuine advertising, so look into your social wall today and help your hotel check-in to social, so your guests can check-out your content!

Which example did you like the most above? Did we miss one that you've seen implemented perfectly? Let us know in the comments below!

-Quinn

Happiness TrueLoyalern