The importance of your hotel’s Instagram page is growing in lockstep with the popularity of the social media platform. Rest assured, it is not just for millennials…
Not only does Instagram offer a great way to show off your property and connect with guests on an emotional level, but through guest photography or UGC (user-generated content), it’s also enabled hotels to share their brand story in an incredibly authentic way.
Unfortunately, most hotel social media practitioners handle Instagram in the same shortsighted way they handled Facebook 5 years ago, making three critical mistakes:
1. Designing their page for fans/followers rather than buyers
2. Failing to recognize that unpaid social media posts reach very few followers
3. Relying on self-published organic posts rather than guest-generated content
Here’s our advice on how to fix these three problems to unleash your property’s Instagram potential:
1. Design your Instagram page for buyers, not followers…
Who is your direct hotel website designed for… past guests or new prospects?
Most hoteliers would agree, the key audience is NEW customers, because you can’t achieve ever-growing annual revenue projections from your loyal audience alone. Similarly, your Instagram page should be designed for the discerning, connected traveler who is using it to evaluate your property and make a booking decision.
Instagram is a visual tool, so hotels must ensure their page is a visually arresting canvas rather than a chronological display of every event that happens on the property (when was the last time you saw a Taco Tuesday photo on a hotel social feed and decided to go stay there)?
Instagram can be a critical place to move the needle from would-be guest to loyal customer, but that shift won’t happen with content geared only for your current followers. Help move the needle by giving consumers a snapshot of your hotel/brand personality without ever having to click on an individual Instagram post: when a user lands on your feed they are able to see the first three posts on desktop and the first nine on mobile without scrolling. By having a design-focused grid, hotel marketers can give prospective guests all the highlights of the property from the moment they land on the feed, and direct them right to their hotel website listed strategically in the clickable bio link right above your images.
