With the ever growing importance of marketing your business, Hotels have started to focus on social media to do such. More specifically, hotels have been forming Twitter and Facebook accounts and monitoring their action. Why Twitter? Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, "What are you doing?" by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called "tweets", to your friends, or "followers." Twitter is a micro-blogging type of forum. You can talk to anyone who will listen to you and it can be the quickest way to get people interested in new product offerings, contests, prize giveaways and much more.
What companies are finding if you're not on social sites, your competitors might be. Add that to the recent developments that Google and Bing are going to start indexing tweets and you could be missing out on brand visibility, customers and ultimately dollars. Twitter is more than just a site for keeping up with the status updates of everyday life. These same people can be hearing about your business.
Hotels are finding this extremely important for better customer service and to head off negative comments before they grow into unmanageable situations. With some guests having hundreds, if not thousands of followers on Twitter and Facebook, complaints have a big audience. Could it be that if you use social media to air your complaints you could have more power? At certain hotels, the answer is a resounding yes! For example, the Orlando World Center Marriott responded to a recent tweet by a written apology and an immediate upgrade of their guests’ room. With the use of this social media, hotels have formed teams to monitor comments on the sites and go into damage control when necessary.
Furthermore, hotels are using Twitter and Facebook on the offensive in hopes of boosting their ratings on sites such as TripAdvisor. These “savvy” hotels are sending TripAdvisor links to guests over Twitter and email encouraging them to leave a review. It’s working…the Roger Smith Hotel in midtown Manhattan has seen their ratings jump dramatically. The hotel has jumped approximately 100 places in the New York City hotel rankings.
Research has showed hotels realize travelers are using the Web, specifically for reviews, to decide where to stay. Not only have they realized their importance but many have taken action in order to improve their guests’ stays. “About 41% of leisure travelers and 50% of business travelers say user reviews influence their travel decisions” according to a survey from comScore Inc. (www.comscore.com)
Since hotels and other businesses have seen a need to utilize these emarketing techniques, companies such as Hootesuite (www.hootesuite.com) and StepChange Group have been formed to offer them solutions in doing so. Hootesuite has developed software to track Twitter results, monitor mentions by gathering intelligence and tracking mentions of your brand, industry or search terms and even spread messages (they update multiple networks in one step).
Business has found that it is hard to keep up with customer service. Providing timely customer service is the key to customer loyalty and increased sales. Other businesses such as Amazon, WalMart, and Dell have realized the importance of Twitter as well. Not only have they set up Twitter accounts, but each of them has multiple accounts set up (http://www.websitemagazine.com). With these companies having multiple Twitter accounts to manage different areas of their business, they have found the importance of explaining to their customers how they operate on Twitter and what information those accounts provide. All have the same ultimate goal: increase customer happiness, loyalty and getting information to them that they want and need.
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