Social media is great, isn’t it? Just go online and you’ll see that everybody is instbookingpingtweetingsnapping virtually 24/7/365.
Hotels, of course, are heavily involved, and not an hour goes by without the latest hospitality offer or update on my timelines. We are now more in touch than ever with our guests. We can push out offers and news at any time to anybody, and people can reach us through a multitude of channels.
Great opportunities always bring with them great challenges and potential for spectacular failures. Pre-Internet, you could annoy a limited number of people slowly through marketing or customer service failures. Today, you can annoy a very large number of people very quickly — thanks to social media and the internet.
You would have thought that, by now, we would have the whole social media thing fully figured out. Sadly, you would be wrong. Facebook et al are trying hard to make things foolproof, but as Murphy’s law dictates, you can’t make things entirely idiot-proof.
So I thought I would put together a few tips and tricks on how to alienate guests and visitors digitally in a jiffy.
Just starting out on a new social media platform?
Great! Show above average interest in it and update it all the time for the first few months and then stop completely. Nothing screams “We listen and value our guests’ opinion” more than Twitter accounts, blogs, or Snapchat profiles that last showed any sign of life more than six months ago.
Don’t be specific when you post updates on your platforms!
There’s nothing wrong with pinning a picture of a couple of drinks and the headline “Unlimited drinks for only AED XXX tonight!” without any other info. No, “tonight” isn’t a specific time identifier on many social media platforms.
Somebody might look at your content just minutes after you posted it, but others might only see it next week or next month. Always put all the necessary info into your updates.
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