Hospitality Brands and Twitter – Creating a Valuable (Bottom-Line) Asset - By Doug O’Reilly and Oliver Sohn, Seventh Art Media
The Internet has erased virtually all hurdles to inventory distribution for hotels - and social media has done the same with marketing and brand exposure. The key to every hotel’s online business success is thus a function of two elements: distribution + consumer attention.
While distribution is readily available in the online space, attention and exposure are not only more critical to a hotel’s bottom-line success but also far more difficult to achieve. The purpose of Seventh Art Media’s whitepaper series for the hospitality industry is to show hotels and resorts how to leverage today’s communication culture, build high-performing marketing and communication assets, and maximize their social media ROI.
In their whitepaper “Hospitality Brands and Twitter – Creating a Valuable Asset” (free download at http://seventhartmedia.com/) Doug O'Reilly and Oliver Sohn, co-founding partners of Seventh Art Media, present the results from a comprehensive analysis of hotel Twitter account performances. Seventh Art Media examined 135 hotel Twitter accounts and more than 120,000 tweets from November 1, 2010 to January 31, 2011 in order to identify the best opportunities for hotels to utilize Twitter and assign an actual dollar-value to this marketing asset. Based on the research and analysis, Seventh Art Media ranked the Top 20 most valuable hotel twitter accounts and identified seven key findings and success factors for hotels and resorts to build a valuable marketing asset on Twitter:
1. A long-term outlook is the first factor of success. Twitter accounts that maintain engagement and have committed to slow but quality growth over time are now reaping the rewards of their efforts. Playing catch up or making a goal of rapid, but low quality, follower growth sees minimal returns on the investment.
2. Facebook and Twitter efforts are complementary, but should not overlap. On average, accounts with a high volume of content cross-posts between Twitter and Facebook significantly underperform the ones that handle each channel separately.
3. Facebook is an exemplary platform for creating reach and amplification but it requires a strong content pipeline and is weak in creating sustained engagement. In contrast, Twitter is an engagement driven platform that requires care and commitment to build — but once it moves past a threshold level of engagement and volume it rapidly becomes a valuable brand asset.
4. Identifying ROI and objective performance metrics for hotels is an emerging capability. While Klout scores are a good place to start the evaluation of hotels’ Twitter accounts they still miss many important dimensions that can help translate performance into ROI. A point to consider is the fact that follower growth in and of itself is a meaningless statistic. Quality followers will engage and interact with a hotel via Twitter as well as amplify the hotel’s content when relevant. Unengaged followers are a black hole for content and add no value to a hotel’s social media efforts and investments.
5. Twitter offers a low-risk/high reward opportunity for hotels. The top five performing Twitter accounts in Seventh Art Media’s study all have a current valuation of over US$100k and they are all on a trajectory to continue to grow their values exponentially. In Seventh Art Media’s estimation, hotel brands and properties at any level should be able to realize measurable positive ROI levels with proper goals, planning and organizational commitment in place. Once the asset is built, maintenance costs will drop in relation to returns. This means the time to invest is now.
6. Strategies for building out social media success via Twitter need goal-oriented planning from Day One. Once these goals are established the hotel team can build out a long-term roadmap to help overcome internal obstacles, establish an operational culture around commitment to the channel and begin to earn its way to the top.
7. This final point is key: Earn Your Way to the Top. Social media is earned media. Hotels earn attention, engagement, loyalty and conversions by offering value to their audience. In Twitter this means engagement. In Facebook this means added-value content. Beyond that, there are millions of possible combinations and avenues to reach a hotel’s goals. Seventh Art Group’s whitepaper lays out the roadmap for hotels to evaluate the possibilities and begin building an valuable (bottom-line) asset.
About Seventh Art Media:
Seventh Art Media is an award-winning team of social media strategy & content specialists for hotels, resorts, and commercial real estate. Seventh Art Media is a division of Seventh Art Group, founded by David Williams and Michel Mein, with offices in New York, London and Dubai. Seventh Art Group’s clients, including Starwood Hotels & Resorts, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Ritz-Carlton, Plaza Hotel New York, The Related Companies, and many more, have entrusted the company with 150 worldwide projects in 22 cities across 4 continents.
Learn more about how Seventh Art Media can help your hospitality or real estate brand at http://seventhartmedia.com/
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