Hotels are at the centre of all major events. In fact, your social media channels are probably buzzing with news on local events, area guides and other articles. Add to this your own hotel information and your social media is probably pretty busy. There’s endless opportunities to provide great content to your followers, but do you really know what’s working and what isn’t?
Most social media platforms now have their own analytics features, so you can use these to analyse which posts are most popular, are receiving the highest rates of engagement and are most often converting into sales. This can help you to plan the best content for your ongoing social media strategy.
The top two platforms to engage with consumers are Twitter and Facebook, each of which have very different analytics interfaces.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter analytics shows an analysis of your account for a 28-day period. It then has an overview of each month, showing comparative data from the month previous. It highlights key information such as your top tweet for each month, and your top media tweet. This allows you to see what type of content is getting the most engagement from your followers. It’s important to present your content in different ways to followers to see the format they are most responsive to.
One piece of content can be delivered in a variety of ways, which could also affect its popularity. The standard format tends to be a short amount of text with a link to a news or blog section of your website. With just 140 characters for a tweet, it’s therefore important that the text you choose to use really entices your audience to click through to the full content. If you choose not to include a link within your tweet, then you are essentially rendering it pointless. You’re not directing the customer to your website where they could see information that could cause them to convert. Additionally, even if they then chose to visit your website off the back of seeing a tweet, you aren’t able to measure this. Text with a link is, however, the most simple approach to a tweet.
Consumers are increasingly engaging with images, especially when using a platform that is as busy as Twitter. An image is much more likely to catch their eye when scrolling through recent tweets than a piece of text. Images can be used in different ways. A relevant stock image that illustrates the content, along with a small amount of text and a link can be used. Alternatively, custom graphics and infographics allow you to embed relevant information into your image, such as statistics and teaser text. Essentially, you should present your data in various ways in a manner that is trackable. This will allow you to analyse the most successful format for your audience and if any specific days or times receive the most engagement. If one format is most successful, it doesn’t mean though that the others shouldn’t be used at all. It’s usually beneficial to tweet the same information in different ways multiple times to ensure that your followers have the most chance of seeing it.
Facebook Insights
Facebook’s analytics are called insights, and work slightly differently to Twitter. However, experienced marketers will realise the diversity between the two platforms which make this necessary. On the main page you can see statistics for the current week, with a comparison to the previous week. You can then click through to posts, which gives a more in-depth analysis of each of your posts separately. This includes information such as the reach and engagement of each post, which will help you to see what type of content is most successful. Insights on Facebook provide a lot of information. From the data you can get just about anything that you might need to gain a better understanding of your audience. It goes as in-depth as to show you the type of people that are viewing your page.
The restrictions on your Facebook posts are much more lenient than on Twitter, but the likelihood is that you have a different audience on each platform. The word limit is 60,000 characters, which is so high that it’s unlikely you even need to consider it. In fact, it would probably be detrimental to your marketing efforts if you did attempt to share a post this large. This gives you a lot more freedom in what you post, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should use it.
Consumers don’t want to see reams of text on social media, so your strategy would be best if it didn’t differ too greatly from Twitter. Much the same as Twitter, you will best be able to analyse your posts by using a variety of formats at different times. Basically, without spamming your audience, you want to give yourself the best opportunity to be seen in a way that they are most likely to respond to and engage with, which will ultimately drive higher conversion results.
