Social Media ROI - How to measure it ?

1. What is meant by 'Social Media is not free'?

. Everything you put into a social media programm has a cost attached to it.

. You need to spend time by joining the conversation and interacting with your community.

. You should hire someone with specific knowledge to develop your Social Media plan.

. Even if the cost of investment is not that high, the financial impact can become huge after taking many actions on Social Media such as creating a Facebook page, a Twitter account and definitely enlarge tthe community by attracting fans and followers.
2. In addition to rooms bookings, what measurements would be effective for hotels?

. By the number of engaged and active followers.

. By the way they share your information.

. By knowing your reputation, your image.
3. How should a hotel, with limited resources, decide what SM efforts to make?

. Establish the goals you want to achieve.

. Which target you want to reach.

. The type of communication you will use.

. Depend also on your competitive set.

. The budget they want to spend in their Social Media campaign
4. What role does SM play in offering customer services?

. By interacting with your community, you can ask questions, opinions and advices about the current facilities and services offer by your hotel. So customer services can definitely improve.

. Be different from your competitors by posting interesting contents.

. Create engagement and satisfaction.

Comments about Emilie 's article - 4 innovative ways to use web video for small businesses like hotel

I totally agree with Emilie ! Hotels really need to focus on attracting customers with videos. Making a video is really a good tool to reach more people and to influence them more.


With Internet, brands need to be faster and faster and videos can definitely attract people who do not want to read a full article as you said. Create contests for the best videos or any other kind of way to involve the customers can become influencers and enlarge again your community.

Videos definitely add a huge value to your hotel image - even videos than customers made can help you and your future customers to make decisions to book in your hotel rather than others.

Interacting with their customers is more than important so let's do it through videos and share it on Youtube !
 
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10 ways to continue the conversation with customers

The article is about how to continue the conversation with your customers and enlarge your community with a few tips.
This article is also focusing on how to continue the conversation after the customers bought something and how to continue to attract them through social media, emails, newsletters.
It is very important to find the balance of providing good and relevant information and sending too many emails or notifications to advertise on new products. Businesses need to find good ways to continue the conversation and join other conversations by entertaining efficiently the customers and by providing interesting content on social media or through emails.

Other tips are given in this article :
- being constant by posting every day, every week depending of the size of your business
- interacting very often with your customers
- making the customers participating to your "games", your good deals & offers
- answering to any questions: negative & positive
- never abuse of sending too many emails or notifications - never use customers' information without asking their permission
- create a real relationship between you and your customers

All these tips allow the different companies to be aware of the trends of social media and how to interact efficiently with their customers. It is very important to not "polluate" the customers with too many emails or notifications that will decide the customers to delete these emails or put it as spam ! Businesses need to create a tie relationship with the customers and make them being influencers to enlarge the community. Businesses will be able to advertise on their new products and services without spending a huge amount of money on different social media thanks to the customers/fans/influencers.

Continuing a conversation after buying something is more than important : to expand your business, you need to be present everywhere and on any social media in order to create events, good offers, good deals and also to create partnership with location-based service or other tools of social media. Being present and joining a lot of conversation will definitely help you to create an efficient community.


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Comment about Nodira's article - How to create a killer email newsletter

I totally agree with Nodira. This article is very interesting and true: more and more people delete most of the newsletters that they are receiving. And I am also the first perosn who is doing it. We constantly receive too many ads with too many offers. It is essential that company who send these kind offers focus on an interesting subject and content to attract the customers and let them open the email before to delete it.


Key words should be seen first in order to have 1 minute to seduce the customers with offers. It is also very important for companies to create something different to engage efficiently the future customers.
 
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The ROI of video on hotel website

The article is about how a hotel can see a good return by spending a little bit more on video on its website. Video can double the budget of a website project so the question is :
- What does a hotel get back in relation to the small fortune its is spending on this thing ?

According to the article many advantages can be taken of using video on hotel website:
- it will allow the hotel to have a strong visual impact
- it will create an emotional hook to engage the users.
- it will also create a story to make sure that the users can continue to dream and travel when they watch the video.
- the key point is also by engaging the future customers : it is also a good way to increase the hotel image and to enhance its popularity.

But the difficulty is in measuring the right ROI made by a video. It is mesured by the number of times it has been shared and by the viewership. When you are building and communicating a message through a video, the mesasurement is difficult. So it is tough to quantify the success of the video and the great impact of it.

In addition, putting a video on a hotel website create new opportunites by launching new innovative marketing efforts. It allow to create an important opportunity to quickly influence the customer and to create intrigue and a real connection to the brand.

Another way to measure can be taking in consideration : SHARING on social media and use different tools as Klout to measure your great influence and maybe have the possibility to see how many times your video has been shared and viewed by users.
I am totally convinced that making a video for your hotel website is more than important. A video create a story, a real tool to communicate with your customers and maybe the future ones and make the customers understand more your philosophy and the magic hotel that you try to develop.

If you want to create a great impact with your video (that cost you a lot) then share it everywhere !! On Youtube, on Facebook, on the hotel blog and try to make sure that customers will talk about it. The video needs to be innovative, creative, interesting and beautiful. As a customer of luxury hotel or even motel, I love to look at the video and not only pictures. It gives you a real idea of what you will get during your stay.
It is also great when you look for something in particular like a different ambiance, or a special service.

Video is great, so spend a bit more and do it !!

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How can a hotel use Klout scores to improve customer communications?

A hotel can definitely use Klout score to improve customer communications. The first point is when a hotel create a kind of community and generate a high score, means the hotel has a higher and higher number of fans – those fans can also talk between each others about the hotel and what kind of service it can make. The exemple of the hotel in Las Vegas is very interesting as they want to create a community around Klout in order to make the communication between the customers higher and higher by offering the opportunity to stay in the hotel.


This kind of practice can definitely attract more customers and enlarge the communication to different communities. It will allow the customers to try their best to get the best treatment in the hotel that they book only if they get a very high score on Klout. The motivation of having a better treatment if you communicate more with other customers can be very effective. A lot of people will be glad to help the hotel to have a better score on Klout, just to have the possibility to stay in a Suite…

It will also help the hoteliers to define the right target and find the people who are really effective by spreading information about the hotel, sharing their experience and telling story about their stay.

A hotel can also set up a program where Klout score will be define by points to attract the customers; More the customers have points, more they will have the possibility to choose kind of gifts like: additional miles, bonus on their next trip, exclusive invitations, room upgrade…

Comments about Léa 's article

I totally agree with you regarding the importance of the visuals for hotels. Visuals must be an important step of the construction of the website and should be taking in consideration by everyone. Good visuals can change the mind of the customers and can definitely determined their choices to book or no in your hotel.


For my own opinion I really appreciate the hotel website which post video of the hotel or 360° virtual tour as you said. It is very important for the customers to have a look of the reality and have a real image of the hotels. Of course new pictures are helping but the pictures need to fix to the reality in order to not make wrong promises to the future customers.
 
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Asian consumers increasingly looking to buy travel online

This article is about the growth of the Asian market on booking travel online. This research is according to industry sources like Expedia. They planned to see the growth of the market of 30 or 40% comparing of the last year. For them, online travel booking should only grow in the next few months and in the next 2 years for the Asian Pacific region.

The result shows a big contrast with the mature US market which is only growing of 5% every year. As per the article, Expedia decides to launch specific websites in different countries in order to make sure to target the right people as a lot of countries are growing really fast. (Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Korea...). Asian consumers are really looking to buy travel online. Even if countries in Asia are still behind the US or the EU markets, a huge opportunity is growing for the online travel companies as Asia will be the continent number 1 very soon to book online.
Expedia expects between 10 to 20% of their booking revenues coming from Asia Pacific in the next 2 years. This expectation really shows that the online travel market is changing very fast and also shows that Asia is the next important and huge market where brands (luxury, hotels, tourism in general) need to develop their image and adapt themselves to the Asian consumers.

Experts also said that broadband and credit card penetration increases in Asia, so consumers will be willing to spend more online. Everything will be easier for them and buy online will allow the asian consumers to arrive to a new market and for sure they will spread the word very fast. Sites like Groupon and Deal.com.sg also make a huge difference. It definitely helps the customers to discover new destinations, hotels through good deals on those websites: the growth in Asia of those websites is big and travel sites should really consider expanding in Asia and make specific websites to show that they really care of the different populations.

Asian market is more and more important especially for tourism. The number of billionaire in China is now very important and just behind the USA so the habits had changed : travel is now important for the new "richs" and with the development of Internet and broadband the travel online in Asia will definitely growth very soon. Time for the travel sites to find good solutions to expand their businesses all around Asia in order to reach all the countries.

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Comment about Agnes's article

I totally agree with you Agnes ! Small businesses should also be involved in the growth of the social media and should participate to it actively. Social media like Facebook can be an excellent tool for small businesses as it is free of charge and the impact can be huge. So money can be saved to develop other ways to communicate with their customers.


But participating to social media means also being implicate where interaction with the fans/customers is very important. Plus being constant by posting actively interesting comments.

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