Today I want to talk to you about social media trends in hospitality. 

The first one is storytelling. 

You might be like the Raffles Hotel in Singapore or the Philharmonic Pub in Liverpool where you’ve got a historic building, historic past with famous people coming in and going out. So you want to tell that story to potential clients. 

A good way to do this is a short video, place it on your website, on your facebook page, wherever, but at the same time make sure you put some sort of button next to it that means that they can; 

• If a hotel, that they can instantly click that and it takes them through to being able to book a room, 
• If a restaurant, it might take them straight through to a table booking system,
• Or with a pub it might be you take them through to a what’s on guide. 

But make sure you make that journey from watching the video, through engaging with your potential clients, to speaking to them and connecting with them really easy. 

The second is influencer marketing and customer sponsored content. 

This is where you perhaps team up with a blogger who will write about your venue, about what you do, events there, your menus, your drinks offering etc. But make sure when you team up with a blogger that they understand the values of your business, the ethos and your customer base. 

Then you’re looking at generating customer reviews and customer generated content. What you need to be doing with this is making it really easy for your customers to do this. 

A great way to do this is to choose to use a hashtag that you use across all platforms. 

Make sure you’re on all the platforms no matter what it is, even if you don’t understand it, get on there. 

You need to be wherever your clients are. 

So it might be someone like me that I might go to your website or it might be a 20 year old that’s using the latest thing, tiktok, or they might be on snapchat, facebook or Instagram, any of those, you need to be there. 

Make it really easy for them to leave you reviews but don’t make it too in your face you’ve got to strike that balance. 

The third is videos. 

Stats show that we no longer want to read long form text messages, we would rather be watching short videos. But you also have to make sure with the videos you’ve got the captions running along the bottom of the screen, because a lot of people watch videos online, especially on social media, with the volume turned off. So they want to see the movement but they want to still be able to read what is being said. 

The fourth is personalisation.

This is where you target your ads, your experience, to that person. 

To do this you need to gather data about your customers, somewhere like a hotel or restaurant that’s quite easy; you’ve taken booking information, you’ve got their name, address, and contact details. 

In a pub it’s not so easy, but this is where something like guest wifi comes in, where your customers want to use your free wi-fi you let it be free, but they have to sign in first using a social media account so that you then have got that data to personalize your marketing towards them. 

The fifth is to talk about sustainability. 

It’s a really big topic. It’s things like hotels no longer using plastic water bottles in the bedrooms, they’ve got the glass which could be recycled. 

They’re not using the individual sachets or bottles or plastic bottles of toiletries, they’ve gone to dispensers. 

It might be you’ve changed the way you do things in your pub to make it more sustainable. 

Put that story out there. 

The sixth is digital detox.

This is a strange one to talk about as a marketing trend, but it’s digital detox. 

Especially with accommodation venues, hotels, B&B’s that sort of thing. A lot of people that now go away for long weekends, are going away to have a detox weekend. 

It might be to go on a detox, on a health thing, but they also want to come off social media. They are spending all their week on social media at work, so they wanted to come off it. 

What you need to do is make sure your staff are still trained in the old person-to-person hospitality ways of doing things so that they can chat to them, still get the information across to them, but without them relying on social media. 

So that’s my tips on social media trends; 

• Storytelling, 
• Influencer marketing and customer sponsored content, 
• Video, 
• Personalisation, 
• Sustainability, and 
• Digital detox

Hope that was useful and speak to you soon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aifq4Ts7xVk&feature=youtu.be