LEVERAGE HOTEL SOCIAL NETWORKING TO DRIVE NEW BUSINESS

Creating a link network is the art of getting other websites to link to your hotel’s website, and to establish a credible and active presence in online social communities and the Web 2.0. Networking done properly is a powerful social media marketing tool that can improve your search engine rankings and bring you highly qualified traffic.

With the increasing number of social networking and consumer-generated content (CGC) sites, people are spending their time online differently. Today it’s about conversations—interactions that go beyond the one-on-one to one-to-many through a series of social networking relationships that connect us to people, places, and events like never before.

To avoid being left behind, hotels need to consider being on the sites where consumers now spend their online hours. The challenge is to understand these evolving channels and how they can be used to reach new markets. Social Marketing can provide an essentially ‘free’ sales and marketing channel for hoteliers in building connections, community and, ultimately, commerce.

Links from other websites to your hotel website help increase your "link popularity," which is one of the criteria used by most of the major search engines when ranking websites. Also, if your hotel actively engages in social media opportunities, you will drive more qualified traffic to your site, which gives you credibility with the search engines. As a result, you will experience a steady increase in search engine rankings as they begin to recognize your website as a primary authority within your target market.

The key to a successful Social Marketing Optimization (SMO) campaign is knowledge. Having a clear understanding of your hotel’s market, and how your fans and guests interact with social networking and consumer review websites, will enable our team to custom build-a Social Marketing Optimization strategy around your hotel’s specific needs.

TRAVELCLICK’s Social Marketing Optimization solution is a personalized program designed to harness the viral power of online social networks—such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter—to connect hotels with new target audiences worldwide. The offering leverages the expertise of TRAVELCLICK’s award-winning digital marketing team to develop a hotel-specific Social Marketing assessment, one that helps to identify opportunities for your hotel to establish and grow online communities that can build brand awareness and create guest connections. Our solution takes the mystery out of social networking by providing a strategy targeting the most appropriate sites based on the hotel’s profile and target guest demographics.A successful Social Marketing Optimization and linking strategy delivers short-term and long-term benefits:

• Increase search engine rankings
• Increase visibility and qualified traffic to your website
• Build trust and credibility within your target market
• Establish a presence in social network communities quickly and inexpensively
• Increase “community” relations

According to Google™, networking will be the second-most popular online activity by 2012, overtaking shopping and surpassing communication—such as email, and entertainment. Hoteliers who explore social networking early on in its development will have a clear competitive advantage as it matures.