What is your hotel’s digital reputation?
Online reputation management (ORM) is all about proactively influencing the information people find about your business online by using strategies to hide unflattering content further down the SERPs by ranking more favourable content above it.
NB: This is an article from eTourism
Since the overwhelming majority of your guests won’t look beyond the first page of results, taking steps to manage your reputation in this way can have a significant impact on your click through rate, website traffic and ultimately, bookings.
Although ORM has traditionally revolved around paid media such as advertising, as well as blogging and content creation on your hotel’s website, your social media platforms are an extension of your brand and also present a valuable opportunity to put your best face forward online. In today’s blog, we’ll look at how you can use social media to help build and maintain a healthy reputation online.
1. Assess Your Current Online Reputation
Start by determining your hotel’s current reputation online. You’re probably already more than aware of your standing on TripAdvisor and the other most used review sites, but what about on the rest of the internet – on travel blogs, social media and forums?
There are a number of tools you can use to keep track of what people are saying about your property online, including Mention, Talkwalker Alerts and Google Alerts, which is totally free. Using these tools you can set up alerts via email to find out whenever a new piece of content is posted online that mentions your brand and can also keep an eye on what people are saying about your key competitors.
2: Design a Social Media Strategy To Boost Your Hotel’s Reputation
Once you have a better idea of your hotel’s reputation online, you can start a dedicated social media strategy to improve it and influence the kind of information people find about you.
Analyse your competitor’s social presence – if your main competitor has a thriving, engaged audience on a particular platform, chances are it would work well for your hotel too. Use tools like Talkwalker or Facebook Insights to analyse the activity of your competitors as well as key demographic information about your own audience. On Facebook, you can add specific pages to your watch list to monitor how well they perform.
Analysing what your competitors are doing on social media is a great way to come up with content ideas for your own campaigns, keeping in mind that the idea is to take inspiration from them, not copy them.
Establish a social media content production schedule and stick to it – if you’re serious about improving your online reputation, it’s essential to stay consistent and active on all of your profiles. Set up a realistic social media content posting schedule and make sure every member of your team is dedicated to it.
Commit To Social Customer Service – encourage your audience to engage with your posts. Make responding to all questions, comments and feedback in a polite and timely manner a priority.
Monitor Results – the last step is to monitor key metrics on your hotel’s social media platforms. You can use a social media dashboard to keep an eye on the most important stats – a free tool like Cyfe makes this process quick and simple.
Building and maintaining your online reputation means being proactive in shaping the impression your hotel leaves on travel shoppers. Social media presents a valuable opportunity to leave a positive impression as an engaging, personable brand that really cares about its audience.
