The world of social media is getting messy. Meta (formerly Facebook) and Twitter are mired in controversy, and Meta is trying to address stalled growth on Facebook, a plummeting valuation, and an increasingly uncertain future.
How to Weather Disruption?
Diversify your social strategy across platforms and be prepared for change, especially as cycles of growth and decline experienced by social platforms can be swift and terminal. Witness Vine, Yik Yak, MySpace, etc.
Have you considered your possibilities on LinkedIn?
While it’s a business-oriented network, that doesn’t diminish its value for a hotel and potential to draw guests from an audience of 830+ million users globally.
LinkedIn hasn’t experienced controversy like other social networks. The community does a good job of policing itself, prioritizing business and discouraging politicized posts. Also, despite lower penetration, its organic performance on the pages we manage far exceeds that of Facebook. It’s a social network populated by users with serious intent, and - for meeting certain objectives- we find its performance to be superior.
How can you go about using LinkedIn to meet your hospitality goals?
- Fill your feed with thought leadership content, not sales content. Be inspired to create content by everything that makes your property unique, and by the values and services that distinguish your brand. Package this as informative, insightful, trend-observing posts to which LinkedIn users can relate.
You’re being generous to your partners while giving travelers reasons to consider your hotel. This is another reason why LinkedIn is great – most of the conversations are positive and generous in nature.
2. Properly hashtag! Grow your impressions and followers by using LinkedIn’s suggested trending hashtags.
3. Post once a day, every business day. Multiple posts a day can cannibalize post performance. Posting infrequently on non-consecutive days can also hurt your performance.
4. Get your team members and partners incorporated into your social sphere. Tag them in relevant content and create reasons to tag people and companies in your posts.
5. Set up the leads form on your page. Tell your LinkedIn audience to reach out to you directly for special offers available only to LinkedIn followers.
6. Recruit willing thought leaders from inside your organization to regularly write and publish articles (since you can’t do this directly from your page), post, and comment on and share your company page posts. Putting a face on your social makes your brand more accessible. The lead generation we achieve on LinkedIn is typically driven by personal pages, not from a company page.
Guest Writer - Aaron Henry
Aaron Henry is the Managing Director of Foundeast at www.foundeast.com, an independent agency that provides digital marketing, influencer marketing, public relations, video production, website design & development, and market research services for clients across the Asia Pacific region and globally.