Hotel Social Media
The importance of having an active social media presence for businesses becomes greater and greater everyday. And luxury hotel brands are not an exception. Nowadays, many consumers, especially the younger generations, actually favour social media platforms over the traditional search engines, such as Google. This statement is backed up by a survey carried out by Hubspot, showcasing that 31% of consumers regularly use social media to carry out research about their queries. And although this is not the majority of overall internet users, this statistic highlights a huge shift in user behaviour, which is important to note down and get ahead of. With social media platforms and their algorithms becoming more and more easy and quick to find relevant information on, it points out the need for businesses like luxury hotels to make their presence on such platforms known. However, simply creating good content is not always enough. To make sure your social media and content creation efforts achieve the best results, it's important to understand what social media SEO is and how it helps algorithms distribute your content to your target audience.
Social media SEO refers to the practice of optimising your hotel's social media profiles and content to improve your visibility and discoverability across relevant social media platforms. While traditional SEO focuses on optimising your website for search engines like Google, social media SEO extends that optimisation to your social media channels, allowing you to attract more organic traffic, engage with a wider audience, and grow your following of potential guests.
By implementing SEO strategies within your own social media content, you unlock the potential to reach a wider audience, including those who may not yet be aware of your hotel's existence. This presents a powerful opportunity for growth, as increased visibility leads to better brand awareness, ultimately providing you with the chance to drive more bookings.
On top of that, by following the best social media SEO practices within your captions and other pre-posting processes, you put yourself in a greater position to be discovered. Your high quality and engaging content deserves to be seen, so ensuring the last steps of posting are done right will give the algorithm more information about your target audience, helping it to show it on their feeds.
TikTok has now evolved from just being a place to share short-form videos into a social platform that acts as an effective search engine. EConsultancy’s data shows that a staggering 40% of young people now choose to use social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram to search rather than Google. This further highlights the importance of leveraging this changing user behaviour between younger generations and establishing your brand presence in this popular social media platform. By creating content around your luxury hotel, showcasing behind the scenes highlights, as well as making informative videos about your location and all there is to know about it, you will attract new potential guests, who may have not found you otherwise.
To fully optimise your hotel’s content for TikTok, we recommend utilising the app’s features, like on-screen text, closed captions, as well as the video caption (description) alongside relevant hashtags. By filling out these parts of your video with relevant information about your content, TikTok’s algorithm will understand it better and show it for relevant audiences and keywords.
Similarly to TikTok, Instagram is also a popular place for people to do research on. According to information provided by Statista, about 46% of Gen Z travellers admit that Instagram influences their travel decisions. So if your luxury hotel does not currently have a presence on this social media platform, it’s time to change that. By sharing engaging content with your target audience, whether it’s through Instagram reels or pictures, you have the potential to reach brand new travellers, who aren’t aware of your brand yet.
To increase your reach even more by implementing social SEO, we recommend utilising the elements already provided by Instagram. Such could include relevant keywords and hashtags within your content captions, however it’s important to highlight that they need to be included within the caption, as by placing them in your comments section they will lose any effectiveness. On top of that, Instagram also allows you to edit your alt text, which not only improves your posts accessibility, but also benefits image SEO.
Facebook, which just like Instagram is owned by Meta, also puts a strong emphasis on high quality content that’s valuable to your audiences, as well as easy to understand for the algorithm. Data from a survey carried out by Meta showcases that 76% of leisure travellers use Facebook for travel related activities, pointing out an opportunity for luxury hotels to capture the attention of potential guests, who regularly spend time on the platform. Facebook, similarly to Instagram, rewards posts with informative captions and high quality visuals, so make sure your Facebook posts are not only reflecting your brand visually, but also are written in a way that will engage your audience and will tell the algorithm what your message is about. Lastly, Facebook puts a strong emphasis on compliance with their guidelines, which if not followed, can cause your post to be suppressed or removed.
Overall, social media SEO offers luxury hotels a powerful tool to further improve the chances of the content that they spent their precious time crafting and polishing, to take off. By providing algorithms with relevant information and telling them what the post is about through using features provided within your social media platform of choice, your luxury hotel gets to reach new audiences, who currently may not know you exist. This investment of time and effort can offer hotels a return of previous guests, improved bookings and better brand awareness. So take the time to ensure that your content is not only high-quality, but the pre-posting processes are optimised and follow the best practices of the platform. Leverage the full potential of social media SEO and elevate your luxury hotel's online presence in the competitive hospitality industry.
