Developing your hotel social media management routine

Effective social media marketing relies on consistency for sustained results. For this reason, you may find it useful to create a checklist of tasks to complete as part of your daily routine. As a hotel manager or marketer, what are these tasks, and how often should you perform them? Because your priorities will be different than that of other readers, it would be difficult for me to tell you how often each task needs to be completed.

Your routine is highly dependent on your needs and priorities, and will probably change over time. That said, there are a few core social media management activities that are widely applicable. You’ll want to work most of these into your schedule:

* TripAdvisor – Check for new reviews & content
* TripAdvisor – Respond to all reviews (positive & negative)
* TripAdvisor – Encourage happy guests to review
* Blog – Post new entries
* Blog – Check statistics (Feedburner & Analytics) for growth and traffic spikes
* Blog – Moderate comments
* Blog – Respond to comments
* Blog – Review other industry blogs
* Twitter – Post messages
* Twitter – Reply to other users
* Twitter – Respond to direct messages
* Twitter – Monitor search terms for leads & reputation
* Flickr – Post new photos
* Flickr – Monitor & respond to comments
* Flickr – Review group submissions
* Flickr – Submit your photos to other relevant groups
* Flickr – Monitor the Explore page for creative ideas
* Digg & Delicious – Submit important posts
* Digg & Delicious – Browse popular stories for ideas & trends

Time management in social media marketing

For many hotel marketers, the biggest issue may not be which activities to perform, but how much time should be spent on each one. How do you allocate your limited time among a myriad of social media options?

I think this is a good time to take a careful look at your metrics. What’s working? What’s not? Follow the data!

This may require you to develop a new set of metrics, but numbers don’t lie. If a trendy new site isn’t producing results you’re looking for, then stop spending so much time on it. Of course, most new initiatives will require some time to build your profile in the community, but after a few months you should have sufficient data to guide your management schedule.

Some networks naturally consume more time than others. Writing a blog post takes longer than posting a tweet. Producing a new YouTube video will take longer than moderating a Flickr group. But if the additional time investment gives you higher overall ROI, then it’s worth it.

It comes back to Pareto’s 80/20 rule – find the select few social media activities that produce tangible results, and focus your time there.

Since this is highly variable on your property and hotel concept, follow these steps to create a unique plan for you:

1. Develop new metrics for measuring social media activity that are relevant to your hotel.

2. Compare your past statistics with your new metrics. (If you have not been gathering sufficient data, then take a week or two to do that)

3. Use insights from your comparison to develop a list of social media top performers – for you.

4. Create your personalized social media management routine based on this data.
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This article was written by Josiah Mackenzie, a hotel social media consultant at Gradigio.

For daily hotel marketing ideas, visit the Hotel Marketing Strategies blog: http://www.hotelmarketingstrategies.com

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