Why Hotel Social Media Fails (You're Selling the Wrong Thing!)
What an Orlando laundry room taught me about hotel social media
One thing I hear a lot from prospects, especially non luxury hotels, is that they have nothing interesting to post. They know they need to be on social media, but they're measuring themselves against luxury hotels and their guests aren't looking for luxury.
A first trip to New York
One of our best clients is a historic, iconic hotel in New York City. The building isn't particularly luxurious. The majority of their audience are people coming to New York for the first time, and that's a special trip for most people.
On my first ever trip to London I stayed at the InterContinental Park Lane. I've only been there once, maybe over ten years ago, and I can still tell you what the lobby smelled like.
So we tell the history of the building and lean into those stories, and we post the practical things a first timer cares about. You can walk to Times Square in 20 minutes. Madison Square Garden is right across the street and Penn Station is ten minutes away. None of that is luxurious, and none of it needs to be.
The laundry room post
We had fantastic results with a branded hotel in Orlando by posting their laundry room. Orlando means Disney and family vacations, which means kids, and kids mean food and candy and soda all over their clothes.
So we did a little tour of the laundry room and its huge washing machines. It gave families the comfort of knowing they could do a load right there in the hotel without going out to find a laundromat or buy new clothes.
Airport hotels have a story too
Years ago I had a one night layover at an airport hotel at Chicago O'Hare. It had a firepit and lots of Instagrammable spots in the lobby, but the most useful thing about it was the shuttle. I could have breakfast, come right outside and catch a shuttle that runs twice an hour over to O'Hare.
That's the content. Do a video of the shuttle ride and say how often it runs, because people are asking themselves those questions while they book. Luxury hotels get this wrong too. They feel a fancy room means they don't need to share that information, but even a luxury guest leaves the hotel at some point to go to dinner or a show.
Ask your team why guests come
You've got a minimum of five or six hotels in your comp set fighting for the same guest. So talk to your general manager and your sales and revenue leaders. Work out who your guest is, what separates you from your comp set and why they'd choose you over the guys down the street.
In smaller markets the answer might be corporate business or kids' travel sports teams. We had hotels in the Gatlinburg, Tennessee area, which is big for tourism in the summer, with lots of car shows and the Smoky Mountains nearby. Your email marketing already uses events like that, and your social media needs to do the same.
Show guests the real hotel
People have gone to TripAdvisor and Google and Yelp for decades because they know your website is airbrushed. Your social pages can show exactly what guests will see when they walk into the room and the lobby, and your people are stories too, like great front desk agents and managers who've been there a long time.
Go easy on stock footage and AI generated content, because people are very good at spotting what isn't real. User generated content works better. Run a hashtag campaign along the lines of "Hey, it's summer in Orlando. We are ten minutes from Disney. Tag us in your favorite pictures of you and your family at Disney this summer." Get permission to reshare, and your hotel becomes part of a story guests are already telling.
Check your demographics
Go into Facebook Business Manager and look at your audience by country, city, age and gender. At a different hotel in New York City, our audience was about 70% female, mostly aged 25 to 35. Once we saw that, we started partnering with influencers who fit that demographic. That hotel had gained 200 followers in a year, and it gained 300 followers in two weeks.
Then keep testing. Look at the reach, engagement and impressions on every post, and do some A/B testing until you find the voice your audience gravitates towards. We've seen results flat out ignored because someone in an office said the content didn't fit the hotel's aesthetic. That's like a guest asking the front desk for a double room and being told the king is better for them. We wouldn't do that at check in.
We go through all of this in the full episode. Watch on YouTube or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Calvin and the Revpar Media team build hotel marketing that drives bookings, from social media management to influencer campaigns.
Book a 30-minute callFull transcript
Calvin Tilokee Today's episode is about a problem I hear from a lot of hotel owners, GM and commercial leaders. We know we should be on social media, but what are we supposed to post? That question gets even louder for a select service, branded airport and non luxury hotels that do not feel like they have an obvious story to tell, but guests are not always looking for luxury. Sometimes they are looking for convenience, certainty, location, comfort or hotel. That makes one specific trip easier. In this episode, I'm breaking down how to stop selling the hotel and start selling the reason guests are booking it. If your hotel content is just rooms, breakfast lobby, repeat, this episode is for you. The goal is to help you connect every feature to a real guest decision.
Why this location matters. Why this amenity solves a problem, and why your property is worth choosing, even if it's not luxury. I'm Calvin Tilokee and this is socially awkward. So one of the questions I get quite a bit from prospects is, especially not luxury hotels saying we had nothing interesting to post. They understand that they need to be on social media. They need to be doing more marketing. However, they don't think they have anything worth posting about. And what these hotels are typically misunderstanding about their own value is that guests are not perceiving them, in a luxury way. And that's okay. Not every guest is looking for a luxury stay. One of our best clients is a hotel in New York City that is historic, iconic.
But that history comes with some age that, you know, that building is not particularly luxurious, but the guests are booking this property and not looking for a luxury stay. What they're looking for is they're looking for convenience. They're looking for that iconic feel of being in New York City. What they didn't understand about their audience was majority of their audience are people that are coming to New York City for the first time, and that is a special trip for most people. Those of us who travel and not many of you obviously, work in the industry, but I'm sure you've been someplace with the first time. And that feeling of excitement and, the nostalgia of looking back at these trips, that hotel always connected to it. I'll never forget the first time I went to London and stayed at the Intercontinental Park lane.
I'll never forget that property, because it was part of my first ever trip to London, and this particular hotel is that for so many millions of people that have stayed at the hotel over the years. So what we do from a marketing perspective, especially on social media, is tell the history of the building, but lean into those stories. We lean into why this hotel is the perfect hotel to pick and choose. If you're coming to New York City for the first time when promoting the rooms as much when not promoting the building itself in the in the way a luxury hotel would by talking about design thread counts the little touches in the room when you have a luxury product, that's what you talk about.
But that doesn't mean that's all there is to talk about. On social media. Social media and hospitality in general is all about connection. It's all about connecting with people. And that's how you do that, the way you connect with people by meeting them at their needs. It's the same thing we do in the business. But for some reason these hotels forget that. Or maybe there's a fear of only luxury. Hotels can look good on social media, but later in the conversation, I'll get into some tactics that we use at these this particular hotel and some of the tactics that you can use, in order to showcase a non luxury property because there are plenty, plenty of people out there and they're not all looking for luxury hotels.
Okay, real quick before we continue. If you're a hotel owner or GM who's been told you need social media, but every agency you've tried just doesn't get hospitality, we hear that a lot at rest PA media. We're not a generic marketing agency. We come from hotel operations. We understand rep Pas, we understand ownership and we build campaigns around what actually converts for your property. If that's something you're looking to solve right now, scan the QR code on screen or hit the link in the show notes. Now back to the show.
So another question we get is what is the difference between posting an amenity and marketing? The reason someone should book. And I think that's the key in promoting hotels that, may not fit that beautiful esthetic criteria that most people think works on social media. So when you're posting an amenity, whether it be something is early, check in Wi-Fi. We did a fantastic we had fantastic results with the hotel, by simply posting their laundry room. And I think I'll hone in on that one to answer this question. That one. It really took understanding the audience to make sure that that work. So this particular hotel is a branded hotel in Orlando, which obviously, I think right off the top you would know or what comes to mind is Disney, right, or family vacations when you're talking about Orlando.
And if you're taking a family vacation, that means kids. That means spills and stains and needing to wash a clothes. So the simple fact that we posted that this particular hotel had laundry on property, we did a little tour of the laundry room. I mean, that there was some huge, huge laundry machines, washing machines, things that you would have in your house. Right. And it gave the audience, that comfort level that, hey, you know what? We're taking these kids out. They're going to be running and jumping and playing and spilling food and candy and soda all over their clothes, most likely because that's what kids do, especially on vacation, especially at Disney. And just knowing that they had the comfort level to be able to do a load of laundry right there in the hotel, that was part of the amenity without having to go outside, find a laundromat, buy new clothes.
But that's it comes down to understanding your audience and understanding what they're actually going to be interested in. What what does their day to day in your property look like? Why are they traveling to your hotel and utilizing your property, your amenities, in the way that feels a part of that story? That's really what it's all about. So one way that you want to connect your hotel on social media with your intended audience is identifying those real decision moments that bring guests through the door. And going back to that example of the hotel in New York City is what does that feel like when you step into a hotel in a city you've never visited before?
Put yourself in those shoes. Many of you of obviously you work in the travel industry, and if this means you probably have some level of interest and love in traveling on your own, what did that feel like for you the first time you did it again? To give that personal example of my first trip to London, I recall walking into that hotel. I remember what the lobby smelled like. It had had a unique smell. I can I can describe that lobby and what it looked like. And I've only been there once, and this was maybe over ten years ago. These things tend to stick with people on those memorable, unique trips. So put yourself in that guest shoes when when they're looking for a hotel in your city and they're coming there for the first time, what is going to trigger a decision?
So again, using our New York hotel as an example, the biggest thing for most people coming to a new city is going to be seeing all the sights, right? They're going to want to go to the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Madison Square Garden, Times Square, all these different things. Well, we we promoted that hotel, the convenience of getting to all of those things and all of those sites. Conveniently from the hotel, you can walk in 20 minutes to Time Square. You can. Madison Square Garden is right across the street. There's a subway station that can take you anywhere. All all of the stops are right there. Ten minutes from Penn Station. These are the things that you want to talk about because you're putting yourself in the shoes of that particular guest.
And none of that is necessarily luxurious. We're not talking about, again, thread counts and amenities and spa's. That's but that's not what that guest is therefore. So ultimately with everything that we do at our media, it comes down to understanding your guests. And why are they choosing your hotel? Why would they choose your hotel? Why are they coming to your page? What are they looking for and leveraging your highlights and your amenities and the things that are great about your property. Put that in front of them. Every guest need to make a decision. Even the luxury hotels have to talk about practical things such as what transportation is near you. What are the things to do nearby a hotel? Even if I am traveling to a new city and I want to say the luxury hotel, I'm still going to leave that hotel at some point to go do something, to go to dinner, to go to a show, to check out the sights.
Even as a luxury guest, I'm still going to want to know these things. The differences with the non luxury hotels, you don't have those esthetics to lean on, so you change a story, find that guest because that guest is not looking for luxury. They're looking for you. They're looking for what they can do at or near your property. Why is this hotel a good place to stay? If I'm choosing to have a certain type of vacation, an airport hotel. I can talk about an airport hotel where I stayed in Chicago O'Hare, years ago. The Rose hotel. Beautiful property, well-designed lots. The lots of Instagrammable places in the lobby, a nice firepit. They had paintings on the wall.
It was gorgeous. And it was a one night stay, for a layover. But just because you have a property that isn't necessarily sexy, that isn't necessarily luxurious, does it mean there are things to talk about? And that particular hotel, the most convenient thing? What would you expect? The shuttle to the airport, right. That is such was such a huge key, knowing that, hey, I can stay here, I don't have to worry about getting a number or getting up extra early to, you know, make sure that I have all of that schedule. Part of my experience at this property is I can have breakfast, come right outside, and that shuttles running twice an hour over to O'Hare to get me to my flight on time. But you want to show that you want to do a video of a guest or of what that shuttle journey looks like. Show. Give the information that it is twice, twice a week, because people are going to be asking themselves these questions as they going through the booking process.
Is this a good hotel for me to pick if I want to go to O'Hare, if I want to be convenient to go to downtown Chicago, where whatever this is, this is the information that people are asking for. And on the flip side of this conversation, it's a mistake that I see a lot of luxury hotels make, is they feel that they don't need to share that information because they have a fancy room, and that couldn't be further from the truth. Because even if your hotel is fancy, no matter what kind of hotel you have, guests are still going to need that information. They still need to know why they're choosing you over someone else. So when you're starting to decide what you want to talk about on social media, you want to talk to your entire team, talk to your general manager, your sales leaders, your revenue managers.
These are the types of things that will separate good social media marketing from mediocre social media marketing, because there's a lot of repetition out there, and I don't need to tell anyone to listening to this podcast that you have a lot of competition, you have minimum 5 or 6 other hotels in your comp said that are fighting for that same guest, not to mention the other hundreds or thousands of hotels in the city that you work in. So there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of content, and that's only a small part of what people see on a day to day basis. Given all the content that we that we all see, whether it be memes or celebrities that we're following sports, what your social media marketing is a sliver of the content that that people are going to be consuming on a daily basis.
So the questions you want to start asking yourself as you develop your strategy is, number one, who is our guest? What is separating our hotel from our cops, and why is the guest choosing us over the guys down the street? These are the things once you get there and you start to understand your audience and your demographics, then you can really make content that's going to speak with them. Again, using some of our hotels as an example, when we have hotels that are not in major cities, we have plenty of hotels, branded hotels that are, in smaller markets. We need to understand, well, why why are people coming to this market? Is it a certain corporate business are they coming for is a majority sports teams, you know, kids travel teams, things like that.
Seasonal events. Boardwalk, you know, these cities that have, lots of a bustling downtown that, you know, they may be coming for, whether it's, we had some hotels in the Gatlinburg, Tennessee area that's a big tourist area in the summer. They do a lot of car shows. But also they're not far from the Smoky Mountains and the national parks and hiking and things like that. But you need to understand why people are coming to to your area. So those are questions you need to ask yourself first. And your revenue and your sales leaders will understand this, because that's part of that process. And that's, again, the mindset that we bring to our marketing here at our media is bringing that though those years of operational and revenue and sales mindset, seasonality, planning, thinking about events, World Cup is going on right now.
But I'm sure you have things like that in your area that bring people all these different things, and you want to be able to use that to build your sales, your social media and your larger marketing strategy. You're doing those things with email marketing. You're doing those things with, with packages on the website that your social media needs to be the same thing. So start asking yourself those questions. Or my guests, why are they coming here and why would they pick us? So hotels that don't have luxury design, rooftop views, that big destination appeal, the types of stories that work our is comes back to everything on social media. We're all bombarded with a lot of inauthentic content these days, especially with the rise of AI.
And I generated designed and people are, I think, very good at picking out what is inauthentic. So you want to tell authentic stories, on social media. And that's always been the case. People go to these alternate sites, because they know your website is airbrushed and professionally done, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's what the website is for. However, people have been going to TripAdvisor for decades and Google and Yelp and all these other review sites. Why? Because they want to see the real hotel. They want to see the real product. They want to see the real restaurant, whatever it is they're looking for, because they know that what you put out on your website is fabricated to an extent.
They know it's airbrushed. They know that it's been, perfectly curated to give, put you in the best light and that's fine. Again, however, you now have the ability to do the same thing that they're getting to give them the same information they're getting on TripAdvisor, on your social media pages, do authentic content, show them exactly what they're getting when they walk into that room, into the into the lobby. Because again, you'd be surprised. The majority of hotels that are non luxury, the people that are picking you, they're picking you for a reason. If they wanted a luxury hotel they'd be looking for that. They're not worried about that. The room doesn't look, meticulously designed inside by some world famous architect. That's not what they're looking for.
They're looking for comfort, convenience and service. Or every single hotel has that to be able to point to. You have people you have stories you can tell, about, you know, great service, great front desk agents, great housekeepers, general managers, managers that have been there for a long time, people that are connected to the community that they're coming to visit. These are the type of stories you want to tell. These are the type of things you want to you want to talk about when you don't have a fancy rooftop to point at. And you know what? Again, that's not what the what these guests are looking for. They're looking for comfort, convenience, efficiency, potentially, if you run a branded hotel, in a, in a not in a large market, they're, they're a corporate traveler that's there for the week.
Because their task force or whatever it is, will show them that, you know, what they can they can check in quickly. They they'll have a clean room, they'll have a great restaurant to eat at every night and meet them at the level that they're at. You are not running in the same lane with, five star hotels in, in, in Dubai or New York City or L.A. That's it's you're they're not on your comp set. So why would we be comparing our social media efforts to what they're doing? It just doesn't make sense. So forget about this notion that, oh, I'm not fancy. I can't do anything on social media. There's a whole world of people out there that are looking for exactly what you have to offer.
You just need to put it out there in front of them. So one thing that we we get asked a lot is what type of we don't want to feel generic or disconnected from, from the guest journey. And that's really important because we want to make sure that your, your social media is meeting guests at, I don't know, authentic level. You don't want to use a lot of stock photography if you can avoid it. Again, as I mentioned earlier, we're all bombarded with inundated with content every day, and people are getting very good at being able to identify what's real and what isn't, what's eye and what isn't. What's that footage of what's not, what's airbrushing, what's not Photoshop, etc. we've all been looking at this for years.
The mistake I see a lot of, a lot of hotels making is putting stuff out there that they themselves wouldn't engage with. And you see hotels, oh well branded hotel. So, you know, we just we'll use a lot of stock footage or make an eye generated thing. And both of those strategies can be used when appropriate. But it's not something you want to rely on solely and completely. I don't think that that is something that is it doesn't resonate with with audiences as authentic. It doesn't resonate as something that people will engage with further. So do your best to, a better way to go about that is get user generated content. If you can do some sort of, a hashtag or a campaign on your social media.
Hey, it's summer in Orlando. We are ten minutes from Disney. Tag us in your favorite pictures, of you and your family, at Disney this summer, or staying at the hotel or taking our shuttle to Disney? Even better. Right? How? Like, how do you weave your hotel into the story that's already being told into that guest journey that's already happening? And utilize that and, you know, get permission from from people to, to reshare that they've they joined this at the campaign. They're giving you permission to to you reshare to your channels. These are these are better tactics than relying on something I generated or stock that is something that you really want to use as little as possible. Use very strategically.
And make sure that it, even when you do it blends over with your overall look and feel of the hotel. If we're going for a nostalgic, type of, you know, yesteryear vintage type of feel where we're telling a history and a story about the property, we don't want to have a lot of AI generated content on the feed, because that's more future now going forward. And, you know, computer generated, it doesn't match your story. So make sure that you know what your story is and that you stay on that as you continue down, down the path of creating content. So I'm going to leave you with a quick audit that you can do to make sure that your hotel is reaching the audience that you want, and making sure that you're not positioning yourself against hotels that you're not really competing with.
You don't want to, as a non luxury hotel, get into the line of creating luxury content. Number one, you may not be able to do it as well as a luxury hotels because you don't really have that, you don't really have that product, but be you being inauthentic. Your guests is not getting that when they arrive. So we don't want to sell something that we're not delivering. And I think that's a big fear amongst, the decision makers in, in branded hotels and non luxury hotels when deciding on social media, on a path to take for social media, which is totally understandable. But again, as we've been talking about in this episode, you want to lean into what you do have.
Okay. So the biggest thing you can do from you for yourself is check out your demographics on on your social media pages. The Facebook business manager, you can dive right into there. You can find out everything from the countries, the cities, the age of your audience, the demographics of, of whether it's male or female and the age ranges of your audience as well. So that's going to help you when you understand where people are coming from, what type of content they're going to be looking for. Because if your audience, I can I can give a great example, one of one of our hotels and a different hotel in New York City. We, our audience there is about 70% female.
And we did a partnership with a younger influencer once we dug into these, demographics and we saw that it's primarily aged 25 to 35 females that are on this page. Then we shifted our strategy, and we started partnering with influencers who fit that demographic and made content that spoke to them. Things that they're doing in life that are kind of hotels. They want to be looking for the activities they're going to be doing while they're at, a hotel like ours. And immediately we saw results. We saw, a hotel that had gained 200 followers in a year, gained 300 followers in two weeks by partnering with an influencer, simply by looking at our demographics. So the audit you can do as you're posting, as you're putting things out there, going forward, look at the results, look at the reach, the engagement, the impressions, look at the demographics, see how many followers are coming to you based on each post.
And which ones are doing better. Test things out. Don't be afraid to to do some ab testing out there until you find your voice and find the voice that the audience likes. That's the key. It's not necessarily your voice, your hotel's voice. It's the voice that the audience is gravitating towards. If I can leave you with one thing before we sign off today, the biggest mistake I see in social media is people prioritizing their opinion and their vision, as opposed to prioritizing the audience vision. We've seen it where results are just flat out ignored. People are like, oh, we love this type of content. But someone in in an office somewhere says, this hotel doesn't have that kind of brand or that this doesn't fit our esthetic. It doesn't fit what we think this hotel should be. And that vision never gets seen again.
And that is that's a huge issue because basically it would be like telling someone who checked into the front desk, oh, I want a double room. And you said, no, you know what? This king is better for you. As if the guest doesn't know what they like or want, right? We wouldn't do that. But somehow we think that's okay to do when it comes to social media marketing. So listen to your audience, figure out your demographics and try things, try things that are different because there's a lot of content out there in the world that we're all being bombarded with on a daily basis. And in order to stand out, you need to be different than your comm set in. You need to be different than you've been doing it up to so far.
