You probably have a robust hotel social media strategy in place that targets portals including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but are you making the most of LinkedIn? If not, you might want to consider adding it to your marketing portfolio, as it can be a quite useful tool for targeting potential guests.Why LinkedIn? Unlike some of the more talked-about social media sites, LinkedIn takes more of a professional than a leisure stance and as such, has become famed for being a site where people go to network and look for jobs.
However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful for hotels looking to promote themselves – after all, business people are among the most likely demographic to be travelling regularly, so they will need to know where to rest their heads after a long flight. In addition, the stats for LinkedIn speak for themselves. There are now 433 million registered users and two new ones join every second, while the site enjoys 106 million unique user visits every month. Surely you can’t afford to be ignoring a potential audience like that? How to get active on LinkedIn To get your hotel on LinkedIn, all you need to do is create a business page and this is quick and easy to do, as well as being free. Add all of your professional information and ensure your contact information is up to date.You can then start connecting with peers, past guests and future bookers.
Remember that you can post long-form content on LinkedIn, but you don’t have to worry about being on there quite as regularly as you would on other sites such as Twitter – people don’t tend to use it for frequent contact. Do keep checking it regularly though, just in case!You should find that having an active LinkedIn profile boosts your organic search results, because pages tend to perform well in search results for companies and groups.What to do on LinkedIn It can seem tricky to get your head around at first, but LinkedIn is actually quite simple. If you take a look around the site once you’ve joined, you’ll see a whole host of interesting content on a variety of topics, from job hunting to meeting etiquette. It’s possible to add to this by publishing your own posts on topics relevant to your hotel (including information about meetings if you happen to have a conference centre) and linking them to other posts on the same subject. This will help you to build a profile as a thought leader, boost sharing and hopefully increase the profile of your hotel.You can also add any projects that you have completed through your hotel to your page to show your capabilities to anyone looking around for the same thing.
For example, if you recently hosted the finals of the international spa massage championships, talk about it and people will know you’ve got spa facilities and that you’re held in high professional regard in this area.Another great thing about LinkedIn is that you can join groups and that you can be in 50 at any one time, potentially increasing your exposure to a really wide audience. For example, if you want to host more corporate events, you might consider joining a group on event planning and get your name seen by potentially hundreds of thousands of users. Professionals join these groups to chat, ask questions and receive information so your hotel could easily provide it. Once you have joined all the groups that you consider to be relevant for your hotel, then you can look around for others that complement them in order to build your community and network with relevant users. Don’t forget that it isn’t just business on LinkedIn – your hotel could become part of a local attractions community that appeals directly to leisure travellers and could therefore lead to more traffic to your hotel website.
Another key point that might get overlooked on LinkedIn is that you should network and link up to your competitors, because it helps you to carry out research but also helps would-be guests. If you see requests for a certain type of accommodation that you know you can’t cater for but the hotel down the road can, you should post the information to the user concerning your competitor.This solves their problem, might result in the other hotel returning the favour in the future, makes you look unselfish and also quietly boosts your profile by getting your name on the thread, even if it doesn’t directly result in a conversion that day.There are lots of different things you can use LinkedIn for: try networking with wedding planners who might add your hotel to their portfolio, publicise the accommodation as a banqueting venue, or show it off as a great place for public speakers to draw in the crowds. As you can see, it’s a more useful hotel social media prospect than you might have thought – why not give it a try?
