Nov
7

2012

How Blogging Helps Your Hotel’s SEO

Chances are that most of your competitors are still not blogging. How’s that for a well-kept secret to improve your hotel’s SEO?

For the most part, hotels seem to feel it’s a drain on their limited time (which it can be if you don’t have a strategy in place) so they only go and take care of the most basic things to improve their rank: implement an SEO strategy, obtain local citations and links, setup their business profiles (Google Places), ask for customer reviews, and more. By the way, trust me on this: the local SEO company you decided to work with went through and did everything on that list and that’s it, but that’s a story for another day.

This actually works to your advantage however. Since all of your competitors are doing essentially the same things to improve their rankings, they really end up making little or no progress. But, if one of you start blogging regularly (and I hope that’s you after reading this), your hotel can quickly ascend the SEO ranks. If you start early and start fast, it’ll take much longer for your competitors to find out what you’re doing and catch up.

Here are some quick and easy ways to get started!

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Use WordPress. WordPress already has a ton of SEO-ready features built-in, but if you’re new to blogging it can get overwhelming trying to install their add-ons. It’ll definitely help to bring in someone who’s familiar with WordPress who can easily go through and install what you need.

Integrate with your existing website. A common mistake hotels make is setting up an external URL for their blog (something like hotel_name_city.blogger.com), but it’ll be tough to convince Google that the content on your blog is tied to your hotel’s website. Do yourself a favor and make sure the blog is installed in a subdirectory or a subdomain.

Research your keywords. Oftentimes, a hotel website focuses on one set of keywords on its website and then blogs about something completely unrelated. In order for your blog to enhance your rankings, you have to make sure it’s in tune with your overall SEO strategy.

Use tags and link related posts. Doing so will not only help readers find similar content but it will also help with topical keyword associations.

Post regularly. I know it’s one thing to start a blog and another to post frequently, but make an effort to post at least twice a week and you’ll start getting the hang of it! In fact, I advise you to setup a calendar a whole year in advance so you have plenty of time to take into account season changes at your hotel and within your community.

Get creative. A lot happens at a hotel — you run into interesting people from around the world, someone from your staff goes out of their way to do something extraordinary for your guests, you win an award, or you upgrade amenities. Not to mention, all the things that happen in your community such as local events, new restaurants, and opening of new attractions. Be sure to mix up your posts so that your readers gain insight into your community first and your hotel second; hotels that only promote their specials and facilities will quickly get drowned out! Remember, every community has a story so be sure to uncover that story and put your own spin on it.

Share content. Look to see which blogs or online publications people in your community read. Reach out and see if you can write a guest post for them. They’ll likely link back to you which will only enhance your SEO rankings and also boost your name within your own community.

Starting a blog and posting frequently is always a tall order for hotels because your staff’s time is limited. Plus, the return on your investment is not always immediate. If you can manage to overlook that, schedule some time, and commit to the long-term value you’re bringing to your hotel, you’ll quickly gain an advantage that your competitors will be hard-pressed to win back

TalkHotels is an online community for hospitality professionals. Sign up today at TalkHotels.com!

Did you find this post useful? Be sure to share with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

Nov
5

2012

How Facebook Stole Your ‘Likes’

Earlier this year, Facebook users and owners of hotel fan pages started to see a drop in content they saw from pages they ‘liked’ — or even updates from their closest friends and family members. If you’re a hotel that also monitors how Facebook generates traffic to your website, you probably noticed a measurable drop-off in traffic too. It turns out this is tied to the latest sneaky Facebook innovation: the Promote feature. Recently, Ryan Holliday, PR strategist and social media expert, shed some more light on the topic:

“It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access. As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, ‘sponsoring posts is important.’ In other words, through “Sponsored Stories,” brands, agencies and artists are now charged to reach their own fans—the whole reason for having a page—because those pages have suddenly stopped working.This is a clear conflict of interest. The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories. In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meant raking in nearly $1M a day.”

The TalkHotels Facebook page has 600 ‘likes’ and we post just about once a day, five days a week. That totals to 260 posts a year that we share via Facebook. To access all of our ‘likes’, Facebook is asking us to pay $5-10, which totals to $1300-2600 a year for us to gain the same maximum exposure on Facebook that we once got for free. And this number would only grow as the number of ‘likes’ grows. Which begs the question: is it really worth it to grow your Facebook audience?

In a NY Observer article on the same topic, there were several telling comments from frustrated Facebook marketers.

I run a Facebook page with 15,000 fans. That’s 15,000 people who have consciously signed up for our website updates and want it to appear in their newsfeed. Yet, we’re having exactly the same problem this article chronicles. We’re barely reaching 15-20% of our fan page and we’re sharing stuff that always used to be popular. Facebook for us was always a vehicle to drive traffic to our website (just like our email list, twitter page, etc). It’s become less and less valuable as a tool to do this due to Edgerank and Facebook wanting to charge you to reach the audience you’ve ALREADY paid to reach. It’s a betrayal. It’s just not worth it to pay $100 to reach all of our fans for one article. As a small business, I’m starting to care less and less about Facebook and I’m not alone. They need to get rid of Edgerank and get rid of Sponsored Posts.

And

I have a similar experience, my page has over 40,000 fans and when Facebook started this the traffic to my website dropped from 30,000 a day to 5,000 a day. I tried paying for extra reach but it’s not worth it for a small site like mine. The fee they charge I can not make up thru ad revenue. It’s probably fine for McDonalds page or Coke who can afford $200 per post for the full reach. I would be all for paying if the cost to play wasn’t so steep, they need to come up with better scaling for the fees for smaller pages. They don’t care about the little guys when they can sock it to the big companies. The worst part of it though is the lying to our fans that sign up to see our content and then never do unless they fall in that 15% group. Facebook has a number of other issues that make most of its users hate it. I know I despise it and I am desperately trying to find a way to replace it for promotion.

So how do you combat this? Here are a few tips:

1) Emphasize your e-newsletter signups. After all, that’s one database you’ll always control. You can still do a great job sharing events going in your community, specials you’re running, sharing blog posts, and much more.
2) Divert more traffic to your Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Pinterest. If you’re not on Instagram yet, here’s how you can get started on the fly.
3) Make your guests aware of your commitment to move away from Facebook. If you have to (and if it’s within your budget), do pay for a few Promoted posts just to make sure your post gets seen by all of your fans. You don’t want your fans to lose interest thinking you no longer care to post quality content; just explain to them that you were still putting out good content but it just wasn’t being seen by your whole audience.

Be sure to share this with your friends in the hotel business! It’s very important to make sure you’re getting the best value from your investment in social media. If you’re going to put in time and effort in gathering unique content for Facebook only to find out it’s not even being seen by your entire audience, it’s best to shift your efforts elsewhere.

TalkHotels is an online community for hospitality professionals. Sign up today at TalkHotels.com!

Nov
1

2012

10 Tips for Getting Your Hotel on Instagram

Crossing the 100-million user mark recently, Instagram is becoming the benchmark for capturing, editing, and sharing images across the social web. Here are 10 things you can do today to get your hotel on Instagram.

Reserve your name. Instagram is currently not set up to have business accounts, but that still shouldn’t stop you from having a dedicated account for your hotel.

Setup your profile. Instagram allows you to add a profile image, a small bio, and a link to your hotel’s website. Take advantage of filling these out and be sure to keep your information descriptive and simple. Most importantly, since Instagram is mobile-based, be sure to link to your hotel’s mobile site.

Connect with other social media profiles. Instagram is great when it comes to connecting to other social platforms to share your photos. Be sure to connect your account to Facebook, Twitter and any other third-party social sharing sites where you have an account. You can do this by going to Profile > Edit sharing settings.

Come up with a story. Pictures speak a thousand words and that’s what makes Instagram an ideal platform to tell a story. You’ll have to tell one, actually. Spend time experimenting with photos via your Instagram to see what your guests and potential guests are most interested in seeing. It may be local attractions, it may be the bright faces of your hard-working staff, or it may even be the sunset you see every morning from your general manager’s office. Find a story and tell it so people have a compelling reason to follow you on Instagram.

Come up with a schedule. Categorize your photos in groups and come up with the best time each week to share certain photos. You may decide to share behind-the-scene photos early in the week, photos of local events during the week, and cap off the week by sharing a photo of your top team member on Friday. Over time, your hotel will get a solid idea of what types of images are working well and when they work best.

Integrate with other platforms. Instagram is good on its own but it’s even better when integrated with other social channels such as Pinterest (learn more about my views on Pinterest here), Tumblr, and Facebook. One thing you must be be careful with is making sure you update the text/copy so that it’s more suitable with various platforms. A good call-to-action on Pinterest may not be as effective on Facebook and vice versa.

Involve your staff and employees. A solid social media strategy takes commitment from each person on your staff. Because of the team approach it often takes, it’s a good opportunity to involve staff members and let them unveil their creative side. After all, showing the actual people behind your hotel (and how much fun they have working!) will help put a face to your hotel and make you stand out. Otherwise, you’re just a building with rooms and those are everywhere already!

Engage. Instagram is a community too and making sure you keep the lines of communication open is just as critical as it is on Facebook and Twitter. Reach out to your followers and other Instagram users, especially if they are traveling to your part of the world or talking about your hotel already. If you’re not active, you shouldn’t be there at all.

Tag and Geo-Tag Your Photos. Incorporating hashtags (just like on Twitter) will help increase visibility. A great start can be as simple as using a hashtag for the photo’s subject matter, location, and maybe even additional inspirational descriptions. Instagram now places even more emphasis on geo-located images with their integration of a map function in app so geo-tagging your photos can provide additional visibility.

Use Available Tools To Optimize Your Content. There are a number of different tools such as Statigram or SimplyMeasured that are available for hotels that can shed light into your most engaged times to post during the day, best filter used, and even identifying your hotels advocates who engage with your content the most. Using these tools will help you see what you’re doing well, what you can improve on, what you should continue experimenting with, and finding the most loyal users within your community.

Hope that helps and you share this with your friends and followers! Be sure to share your Instagram URL with us at social@talkhotels.com. We’re doing a profile soon on various hotels using Instagram and would love to include you.

If you found this blog post useful, be sure to sign up with TalkHotels.com today! You can join here.

Oct
29

2012

How to Verify your Hotel on Pinterest

Just a short while ago, I wrote about why I believe Pinterest will become more valuable for Hotels than Twitter. Turns out, Pinterest is now taking steps to make their insanely-popular community more friendly for businesses too. Pinterest now offers website verification for profile pages (not all of you will see it right away though so sit tight!), which will allow you to highlight your full website URL on your Pinterest profile. Users will also see a checkmark next to your domain in search results and on your profile.

Here’s how you can verify your hotel on Pinterest:

Step 1: Log in to your Pinterest account, and go to ‘Settings.’ Be sure to check if you’ve listed your website here before clicking the ‘Verify Website’ button.

Step 2: On the next page, follow these instructions. You may need to get your web/marketing team involved! Click the bold ‘Download the HTML verification file’ to download the file, which will take you to a confirmation screen. Just click back here to this screen and continue on to the next step.

Step 3 (Step 2 on Pinterest): This is where it may get tough for you if you’re not tech-savvy. You’ll have to upload that file you just downloaded to your web server but make sure you do not upload the file to a subfolder. Otherwise, Pinterest won’t be able to find it. If you’re completely overwhelmed by this, get in touch with the person that maintains your site and they’ll get it done in the blink of an eye.

Step 4: Complete the process by clicking the bold ‘Click here’ text you see on the verification screen. Now, Pinterest will check your website for the HTML file they gave you, and verify it. You’ll see a success message once the process has completed. Now, instead of your profile looking like this:

It’ll look like this:

I hope you found this helpful! If you did, please be sure to share with your fellow hotels on Pinterest! If you’re not a member of TalkHotels yet, be sure to join today! It takes less than a minute and you’ll instantly be networking and sharing ideas with 1,400 hospitality professionals worldwide.

Oct
10

2012

10 Things that Instantly Improve Your Hotel Website

When developing a site for your hotel, don’t get cute. It kills your bookings. Make sure you follow basic principles that the modern Web user is now accustomed to. When you accidentally (or arrogantly) try telling customers that how they’ve browsed the Web before was incorrect, they’ll leave your site.

1. Clicking on the logo should always take you to the homepage.
2. You should have contact information in the footer.
3. Strive for consistency: navigation and other important elements should remain in the same location throughout the website.
4. Links should be easily stand out from regular text.
5. Left-aligned text is easier to read than right-aligned (since westerners read from the left).
6. Don’t use stock photos. Use photos of your actual rooms.
7. Avoid Flash.
8. Design so that bookings are encouraged first and everything else second (such as ‘likes’ and ‘tweets’). Don’t try to get too much from the customer in one visit.
9. Make a manager’s contact information available. It makes you look serious about dealing with guest satisfaction.
10. Don’t post fake reviews on your own site. Most customers won’t buy it as they’ll consider at least 2-3 other resources before deciding to book with you. When TripAdvisor shows a different side of you, your credibility is instantly lost.

We’re still amazed at how often these basic principles are overlooked. Have other tips or suggestions? Shoot us an email at social@talkhotels.com or leave a comment!

Sep
28

2012

Why I believe Pinterest will become more valuable to hotels than Twitter

I read a fascinating article on the story behind Pinterest and how unique their growing user base is (they are now the fastest-growing social network in history). A great read by Fast Company. I know Facebook and Twitter are the two most recommended and widely-used platforms for hotels, but I see Pinterest becoming the top choice. And soon. Here are some of the reasons:

Pinterest delivers the highest purchase value when they purchase something seen on social media (according to Fast Company). I believe it’s because they use images as their focal point.

Pinterest is visual. Images sell. Hotels can easily share photos of their accommodations and amenities, staff members who are being recognized, area attractions, popular dishes at local restaurants, and visual reviews from guests who just want to share a photo of their room instead of writing a long review.

Pinterest is designed to be guest-centric. Since each traveler can have their own board and pin anything to their board (rooms, hotels, destinations, dishes, drinks, attractions, family photos), hotels can gain a better insight into what guests are looking for. For instance, you can tell which guests prefer family-centric amenities versus business-centric; you can tell which guests prefer a good steak versus a good salad; you can tell which guests prefer coming in the Fall versus coming in the Summer.

If you’re a hotel that currently uses Pinterest, please share your profile in the comments section and be sure to tell us about your experience thus far. You can also email us at social@talkhotels.com. If we like what you’re doing on Pinterest, we’ll do a feature post on your hotel!

Jun
2

2012

This Week In Hotels

Another week has gone by and here are some of the most interesting news from around the hotel industry space.

1- Sabre made some money in 2011, but its Travelocity business, beset by a decline in transaction revenue and unfavorable new airline agreements, dragged those numbers down

Trouble with Travelocity

2- An experiment run by Google seems to be taking advantage of the hotel intellectual property rights.

Google Hotel Finder-OTA advertisers commandeer hotel pages

3- Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, has released her latest compilation of data concerning trends on the web and in mobile. Meeker’s analysis and data points give a comprehensive overview of what’s happening now in tech.

May
31

2012

Brand Advocates: A Source Of Recommendations And Feedback

A hotel which delivers consistently is bound to develop regular guests. These guests over time become so loyal to brand or product that they recommend it to their friends and family.

The benefit of developing brand advocates is that not only they are repeat business but they actually care about your business. They make suggestion on how you can improve something. They are much more forgiving than a first time user because they know the lapse in service does not always happen and if it is brought to your attention you are going to take care of the problem.

Continue reading →

May
25

2012

This Week In Hotels

Another week is done. Here are some of the new interesting articles from around the web.

1. Accor has launched an emissions calculator, the Carbon Optimiser, in an attempt to allow business customers to make more responsible decisions.The new calculator, which will be available to all Accor sales teams by the end of 2012, will take into account factors such as paper and food, dependant on type and serving style, as well as energy used the power the venue. Continue reading →