LA Times featured an article about how Venice Beach Suites & Hotel, a small hotel with 25 rooms, can use social media to boost sales. Venice Beach Suites & Hotel was built in 1912 in Venice Beach, California. A room in this hotel sells for $130 to $305 per night in the summer. However, its revenue dropped 20% last year to $800,000. So far, the hotel has a social media presence at TripAdvisor.com, with 75% of positive reviews. According to the discussion at LATimes.com, the hotel could have done more to increase sales.
1. Use Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to interact with customers and other business. The more interactions, the higher ranking the hotel will appear on search engines.2. Encourage customers to create contents on the hotel’s website and/or other social media networks.
3. Update Facebook often. If the hotel does not have the resource to keep updating contents, then it is more important to encourage more customers to post and share contents.
4. Use YouTube and Twitter. They are cheap, yet effective if used wisely.
5. Use mobile phone applications, like FourSquare. I believe mobile device will become a very important marketing tool soon (probably this is the case already). So, it is critical for a business to implement a mobile strategy as well.
Are these advices helpful? What are your business’ social media strategies?
References:
LATimes.com: http://tinyurl.com/linchikwok07272010
Pictures of the Venice Beach Suites & Hotel were downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/linchikwok7272010P
Linchi Work's social media practice and strategy is a useful business model / social media contingency plan to build on. Not only for rivals but for start up hotels as well.
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