After initially lagging behind other sectors, the hotel industry now has many successful social media campaigns under its belt. However, the marketing medium continues to challenge the industry in how to best determine return on investment, which social networks to focus on and when to join a new social network.
To find out more about what’s ahead for hotels’ social media outreach, HOTELS spoke with Felicia Yukich, manager, global social media marketing Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. The interview was conducted as part of a roundtable of interviews with several global brands that is featured in the March issue of HOTELS.
HOTELS: Will customers become more transactional with hotels on social media, or will it remain primarily for engagement?
Felicia Yukich: Social CRM is an important area of emphasis to ensure conversions, bookings and re-bookings. Being able to listen and respond to your guests in real time is a significant competitive advantage. Brands must identify the key areas in their business that social media can enhance and build activities and scorecards around each goal and objectives. Guest engagement is no longer viewed as distinct interactions; rather it is about cumulative experiences across multiple touch points and channels.
We’ve made it a priority to track the ROI of social media efforts to capture leads and drive sales through social media monitoring, customer conversations, and data analysis. Some of the metrics we use to determine this are: website traffic driven by social media, leads acquired through links shared on social media, rooms revenue attributed to social media and food and beverage or spa bookings facilitated through social media.
HOTELS: How do you determine whether to join newer social networks?
Yukich: When a new social media platform gains popularity, such a Snapchat, we monitor closely and observe the adoption rate of both travelers and luxury consumers, always ensuring we apply a luxury lens when evaluating new opportunities.
Early on, we saw Instagram as an important channel for our present and future guests to connect with the Four Seasons brand and properties worldwide and shifted our efforts to incorporate this new social network that is important to our guests.
In 2012, Four Seasons launched brand channels on Instagram and Pinterest – the first to market on both platforms in the luxury hospitality space. These emerging channels with strong visual capabilities were a natural fit for the brand to share the immense photo collection of destinations and global properties and engage directly with our audiences and guests in real time.
The images that are shared from our sites by our guests, repinned from our Pinterest boards, or geo-tagged on Instagram provide us with a visualization of growing trends from around the world. Pinterest in particular guides travelers further into the online conversion funnel and provides a rich brand experience by using Pinterest to drive traffic to the Four Seasons website and content marketing platforms.
HOTELS: Which social networks are the most important for Four Seasons’ social media marketing?
Yukich: No social platform can ever stand alone. Each social media platform plays a unique role in meeting our various marketing objectives.
Although we are seeing increased activity in the more visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, these channels have become a strategic integrated component of our Facebook content and engagement strategy. To note, Facebook provides the opportunity to connect directly with travelers within their newsfeeds, transitioning branding efforts from glossy magazines to direct engagement. Right now, Facebook is the social network with the largest concentration of users who are Four Seasons guests and is the top social media traffic driver to FourSeasons.com and the World of Four Seasons content network, making it a priority channel for content marketing syndication. Facebook also provides unique CRM opportunities with their ever-evolving suite of advertising products.