Introduction
Lately, social media sites have grown enormously in terms of usership and popularity. As a matter of fact, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are slowly replacing traditional forms of internet communication such as email.
They have become important tools for people to stay in touch, meet new people, and share experiences on sites. With Facebook’s usership surpassing 500 million, social media has today become so mainstream that it has become the newest marketing channel.
As the world of online marketing continues to expand, and innovative ways of communicating with the target customers come to the fore, social media has withstood the onslaught of critics and emerged out strongly.
Keeping pace with these developments, hospitality industry operators have been scrambling to work through the ever-changing web of social media, with a goal of increasing contact with their customers, gauging customer satisfaction, strengthening brands, and improving sales.
Despite these developments, a challenge still remains for hoteliers and other stakeholders in the hospitality industry to invent creative ways of utilizing social media so that they can reach their prospects and customers in a manner that can establish a robust and healthy long-term relationship (Hospitality Industry, 2010).
With the buzz around social media marketing gaining grounds, the hospitality industry has not been left behind as they have made significant inroads with the leading social network sites in fresh and innovative ways.
Indeed, most hoteliers today include Facebook and Twitter share buttons on their websites for satisfied customers to share the word! In addition, hoteliers have become more acquainted with the return on engagement (ROI) instruments existing presently, however, the ability to translate these fans and followers into customers making actual room stays continues to remain a challenge for many (Schneider, 2009).
Hence the reason for this research is to propose ways in which operators in the hospitality industry can take advantage of the current social media craze to retain old customers and attract newer ones and hence convert their social media friends and followers into real customers.
Neha Gupta, a research analyst at Gartner posits that “marketers will begin to transition from ‘onetime placement and click of ads’ toward ‘ongoing engagement’ with the Internet user and will therefore allocate a higher percentage of their advertising budget to social networking sites” (Withiam 2011, 2).
Social media, with the help of special analytic tools, have the ability to unlock the interconnected data structures of users including their list of friends, their comments and messages (tweets or updates), images and all their social networks, contact information and related information (Miletsky, 2010).
To ensure success in the digital space, hoteliers and other hospitality industry operators must take a relook at the entire business structure and this involves setting up new structures, metrics, and processes that bridge the gap between marketing and sales in areas of the company that could result in its ability to understand and engage with consumers on a higher level.
Obviously, a customer relationship management strategy demands that hospitality companies must be active in social media, but the question of what activity is relevant remains unanswered. Specifically, hospitality firms must incorporate social media in their marketing efforts- a process that will require new approaches to marketing.
Despite the challenges that the hospitality industry experiences in realizing the full potential of the social media, some companies are already reaping profits after making necessary structural and operational changes to incorporate social media marketing in their mainstream marketing channels. One of these companies is the Roger Smith Hotel located in the heart of New York (Miles, 2011).
The hotel has a large online presence that it is today known as the “social media hotel” of NYC! Roger Smith Hotel continues to attract a large number of customers who have received information regarding its ambience and approachability from various social networking channels (Hessinger, 2011). This research paper will look at the structures that have been instituted by the hotel to translate its online presence in to profits.
Social Media Popularity
Social networking sites continue to enjoy a huge usership, and the figures continue to rise. Today, more that 600 million people (nearly 10 percent of the global population) are on Facebook. The demographics are amazing; 90 percent of persons aged between 28 and 24 are on Facebook. More specifically, 66 percent of travelers are on Facebook (Hird, 2009).
Research shows that Facebook referrals are far more likely to result into bookings that referrals from travel review websites (Müller, 2011). This underscores the need for companies to make themselves more visible on social media sites. A large proportion of hospitality companies already have a web presence, the challenge is how to convert anonymous visitors into customers (Hospitality Industry, 2010).
A look at the top social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and You Tube, shows that 50 of the largest hotel chains in the world have already registered their presence in at least three of the platforms (Conrady and Buck, 2011). This shows the extent to which social media have become popular in the hospitality industry.
Due to the fame of negotiation sites such as Priceline.com and Hotels.com, along with the influence of online travel agents, customers are regularly looking for deals. However, with the strength of Facebook, online travel agencies are losing some advertising and hotel bookings to Facebook. In addition, if a hotel can gain a referral through Facebook, it gets the full benefits rather than having to pay to a commission (Müller, 2011).
There is no cheaper alternative to this. However, as in the case of conventional word of mouth, friends and family remain the most significant factor in making travel decisions and unless hospitality companies make efforts to market themselves by delivering quality services and meeting their customers’ expectations, referrals will not directly lead to an increase in room bookings or visits.
Roger Smith Hotel has built a culture that not only involves being approachable and building up online relationships but also offering great services at low services (Hessinger, 2011). This has enabled the company to penetrate the heavily saturated market that includes industry heavyweights such as Marriots, Sheraton, Hyatt, Hilton, and so on.
Social Media for Customer Service
One of the biggest mistakes that hotel owners and managers commit is to ignore negative comments. While other companies seek and take action with respect to their customers’ feedback or comments, others simply do not care and only take action when they see a comment regarding the poor service or other negative aspects of their experience at the hotel from some social media.
Still, such interventions are much better than ignoring the comment and letting other people to read it without a comment from the hotel. Hospitality operators can realize improved customer when they initiate a process of monitoring social media for customer feedback. Social media makes is easy for customers to complain when services are not to their expectations.
Customer complains must be intercepted as early as possible, with an objective of improving service and minimizing damage from the complaints.
A company cannot prevent or even remove negative comments once they are posted on any social media platform, but a good approach is to ensure that the bad reviews come to the knowledge of the firm, especially if they are posted on mainstream social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
For this reason, operators in the hospitality industry must not only increase their presence on the web, but also make use of web analytic tools to monitor customer comments (Miletsky, 2010).
For instance, a concierge desk could monitor a Twitter feed for customer comments and take immediate action on the negative comments while acknowledging the positive one too. A firm must act both on the bad and good comments (Laudon and Traver, 2007).
To become a leader in the competitive hospitality industry, then it is critical that a set of tools, standards and practices be adopted. Apart from creating a best-practices website for use by all stakeholders, RS Hotel applies a comprehensive monitoring tool to monitor and provide feedback to customer comments. This tool connects with more than a dozen social sites in one application, merging technology with sustainability.
Customer service not only entails improving services, it also involves smoothening out communication with customers. Hospitality companies must make full use of the real time communication tools that social media provides. For instance, because Twitter is free, hotels can make real time communication with their clients without putting them on hold or even having to spend money while placing calls.
Customers are able to get instant feedback and it means the reception staff do not spend a lot of time making phone calls. It is also easier to make clarifications.
For instance, a guest can tweet Roger Smith Hotel, “i need to change my booking from a twin to a double for the 17th, is it possible?” or “I’ll be in NY for three days, arriving tomorrow @9pm, can I get a single room booking?” the hotel staff will be able to reply immediately.
It is cost-effective, real time and convenient for the customer. One aspect that has made RS Hotel to achieve success on the digital space is its responsiveness to customer requests and comments. While negative comments cannot be avoided, the hotel highlights the positive ones (Walsh, 2010).
The firm monitors social media for customer comments and as the Director of Social Hospitality, Brian Simpson, points out, the firm has made significant improvements in customer satisfaction since it started monitoring customer comments.
Simpson underscores the need for service firms of all kinds to institute a process for social media, including the tool to be used and how it should be utilized (Weinberg, 2010). With a systematic approach, social media can become a very powerful tool for improving customer service and ensuring satisfaction.
Social Media Marketing
Most social media sites allow users to promote products and services on an individual level. On Twitter, hospitality companies can give short messages that explain the services provided by a company (Callari, 2012). These messages appear on the company’s followers and can link back to the company’s homepages, Facebook profile, YouTube, and so on. Facebook allows a more in-depth marketing channel than Twitter.
The site allows companies to create a fan page that includes images, videos, reviews, and more detailed descriptions and links.
Videos can show the inside and outside features of a hotel, services, rooms, staff, customers giving feedback, and so on. Customers can also share their photos of the hotel area on Flickr, accompanied by brief descriptions. All of these channels form an inexpensive channel for marketing and enhancing brand awareness.
In addition, specialized sites such as Flip.to and Foursquare permit a higher level marketing. Flip.to, developed in 2010, allows hospitality firms to monitor positive reviews, comments and quotes from recent customers and displays them right on the company’s homepage (Mowat, 2010).
This feature not only enhances the reliability of the company, it also accords visitors a chance to take action before navigating away from the site. Through this process, Flip.to allows potential customers to learn more about the company while the company also learns more about the visitors (who would otherwise remain anonymous) and this builds a wide pool of potential customers they can contact in the future.
Flip.to also allows contains a Suggestion Page that allows users to make recommendations to their friends besides having a component that collects reviews from one’s followers and displays them on a page created specifically for each and every guest in the hotel (Callari, 2012).
Other sites such as Trip Advisor, with more than 50 million reviews, 85,000 destinations, 475 hotels, and 675 restaurants also offers an ideal platform for a hospitality firm to market its services (Hird, 2009). The site contains apps that can be used on LinkedIn and Facebook in such a manner that customers to learn more about the company, with reviews displayed on each company’s page.
Part of the success realized by RS Hotel is due to the marketing and networking activities that were undertaken through various social media sites. Brian Simpson explains that he initially built up followers by searching for interests that were appropriate to him on behalf of the company. Once connected, he looked at their friends and followers to see if he could make more friends and followers.
He says “The use of Twitter was mainly for the brevity and ability to drive traffic to our blog and booking site rogersmith.com” (Weinberg, 2010). Using word of mouth and communication through various platforms by social networking sites, the company was able to build a loyal customer base that helped it to further market its products by recommending it to friends or writing reviews.
In addition, the company offers a social media/Twitter discount to customers who get to know of the customer through social media, thereby making them feel special. Under such circumstances, it is highly likely that a customer will recommend the hotel to more friends, or write positive reviews about it. The most important element in social media marketing is to have true followers, fans or friends.
“It’s not always about the quantity but about the quality… Once we had one follower, I was happy. It has never been about the numbers but more about the people” adds Brian (Weinberg, 2010). A loyal customer base helps to build strong relationships and this is the most important factor in any marketing campaign.
Social Media for Customer Participation
Social media provides a channel through which customers can provide feedback and hence the company can gauge satisfaction levels in all quarters, including email, the website, telephone conversations, service delivery, and even the social media. McDonalds is another company that has made heavy use of the social media by encouraging participation from its customers.
The services were initiated more than two years ago partly in realization that the company creates lots of buzz around the web. Every few seconds someone is commenting about the firm, and this includes people from all ages. The company’s Facebook page has more than 3.1 million fans while its twitter account has more than 50,000 followers (Cambria, Grassi, Hussain, and Havasi, 2011).
This lets it to engage with its customers and incorporate customer opinions into its brand, creating a relationship between the company and it customers.
The relationships created on social serve two important functions: the company can resolve any issues as soon as they come up rather than wait to solve it at a later date during which the company’s reputation will have ben damaged, and secondly, the relationships address the cautionary issues of gaining information from the internet, particularly, anonymous responses, representativeness of those who offer comments, and their accuracy.
Hence, the company is better place to correct a false or misleading opinion posted on any social media.
McDonald uses an analytic tool that captures any mention of its name on the web and sends the information to the relevant departments for action. The basic concepts in such a procedure include “understanding the content and topics of consumer comments, determining the volume or frequency of messages, checking on consumer sentiment, and identifying immediate customer-satisfaction issues” (Withiam 2011, 3).
Using information provided by its customers, McDonald has been able to roll out several new concepts and products much to acclaim of its customers (Callari, 2012).
For instance, it introduced a chili sauce brand that was only available during the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Many people commented on various social media that the product should be continued even after the games, and consequently, McDonald availed the product in markets where its demand was high.
Mobile Apps
Since more than 80 percent of all guests travel with a mobile device and more than half of the number uses them while travelling, it is only logical that hospitality industries develop apps that allow interaction with customers and potential guests through the mobile phone.
The Hilton group of hotels has excelled in this area with the design of mobile apps for every Hilton brand around the world. Its mobile apps have seen more than 340,000 downloads, and customers used them to book more than 100,000 rooms in 2010 alone (Michael and Salter, 2006). These room bookings partly contributed to the company’s revenue increase of up to 200 percent during the same duration.
It is known that a significant number of customers log in to their Facebook accounts everyday, irrespective of the demographic, market or audience. Hospitality operators can take advantage of this insight by creating Facebook booking apps that allow them to book rooms and check out special offers while they are on Facebook. Facebook room booking apps, for example, Bookassist, can be very useful.
The positive aspect of mobile apps is that once a user adds an application to their profile, all of their friends will be notified through a news feed. Social media users will also be invited to download and use the apps when a friend involves them while using the application (tags them, or mentions them, for example).
Conclusion
Social media presents an ideal platform for the hospitality industry to increase contact with its customers, with a vital objective of enhancing partnership for brand growth and development. Primary to that opportunity are the twin dangers that hospitality operators will misuse their social media contacts or that clients will move, leaving the industry behind.
Therefore, just as hotels and some restaurants have designed their websites, they now have to make sure their site is optimized for search engines, have mobile apps, and specifically, keep clients involved in a conversation about their operations, or rather their services.
Although a number of hotel chains have embraced mobile apps, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks, others are hardly visible at all on the social media firmament. One important advantage of social media is that guest are normally ready to share information regarding their likes or dislikes on a range of issues.
By employing suitable analytic instruments, hoteliers can get to know what guests generally want and how they react to specific services and to the hotel generally. The most important thing right now is for operators in the hospitality industry to develop mobile apps, since travellers are increasingly using their mobile devices to find the best places for accommodation and even booking rooms or accessing other services on the spot.
An all-inclusive strategy of customer engagement should incorporate social media, be it Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or Flickr, so that operators can get hold of new customers and know of their desires without specifically asking them.
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