Twitter For Higher Room Occupancy Levels

April 7, 2010 - Mumbai.

Twitter is a social media tool that you can use to enhance your presence online. By social networking on Twitter, you can make millions of globally situated individuals, who use Twitter, aware of your hotel’s existence, its key selling points and more. However, you have to remember that starting a Twitter account for your hotel is not the same as putting an ad in a newspaper where your work is done once your ad is placed, it is a long-term commitment. Once you have created an account, you need to keep tweeting and responding to tweets in order to keep people interested and engage potential guests respectively. By tweeting, you can achieve the following:    

• Learn what people are saying about your hotel
• Give potential guests an idea about what they will experience in terms of ambience, services and facilities when they walk through your doors
• Connect with previous and potential guests and learn what they found lacking and what they are looking for respectively
• Make people aware of your hotel brand and generate traffic to your hotel website

Now that we know the advantages of social networking, let’s discuss what to tweet? Some people take to social networking like fish to water but others might feel socially awkward just like in real life, so here are some tips on what to tweet:

Employee Info

• New hires
• Promotions
• Retirements

Activities

• Promos e.g. wine tasting
• Live Bands
• Tours

Announcements

• New Restaurant
• New Hotel Wing
• New Service or Facility
• Packages & other offers

By sharing these behind the scene insights with potential guests, you create a level of transparency that makes it easier for people to connect to your brand on a more personal level.

You can also use your twitter account to get feedback such as what they liked and disliked about your hotel, what kind of services they would like to see and what would make them stay at your hotel for their next visit. This feedback has multiple benefits – it gives you a clear picture of which areas you need to improve, what features should become your key selling points for your next ad campaign and the testimonials by guests serve as great free sales tool. In case of negative feedback, you can address the issue and inform previous and potential guests of what measures you have taken to resolve said issue.
  
Twitter also has monitoring and scheduling tools like TweetDeck and TweetLater that you can use to monitor all content easily and publish content when you are away.

Here some examples of the different activities and approaches hotels have taken to engage their guests:

• Best Western holds weekly trivia about destinations to engage its audience.
• Starwood Hotels provides its fans with information about different activities, latest promos and more.
• Hard Rock Hotels posts music trivia and history to engage their fans and followers.
• St. Marks Hotel Bangalore has pictures, reviews and launch announcements.

To summarize, Twitter is a communication platform that can help you stay connected to your past and previous guests. You can use your Twitter account to share information, gather real-time market intelligence and feedback, and build relationships with guests.