Why Social Media is Important for Your Hospitality Property

The last few months I have spent many hours on my computer visiting many websites of Independent Hotels and Bed & Breakfasts. The purpose was to see what sites were working and which were not.

During this research, I was surprised with something I noticed. How many hospitality properties do not have a social media presence and I don’t just mean on their website but no Twitter, Facebook or YouTube accounts at all.

I was also surprised to see how many hospitality properties do not have a way to collect email addresses on their websites or were mobile phone friendly.

I have asked a couple of hospitality property owners about this and was given a number of reasons such as, “I don’t know how they work”, “ I don’t have the time to spend online”, and one actually said “If people what to stay here, they can find me”.

If the sale of room nights is not a problem, than there is no reason to worry about social media but if you want to improve your sales and increase return business, then social media is crucial.

The will be extra work but as I said in an earlier post “short term pain for long-term gain”.

Let me share some statistics with you. I have gathered these from statisticbrain.com which is used by such organizations such as Forbes, CNN, ABC, The Huffington Post as a research tool, from socialmediadd.com and youtube.com/statistics. (http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/stati...)

These statistics are from mid-June, 2013

Internet travel booking revenue has grown by more than 73% over the past five years.

Many people will check out booking engines on the internet before booking a hotel and then visit the properties website for more information.

Annual online travel sales have increased from $93.8 billion in 2007 to $162.4 billion in 2012.

Number of travel bookings made on the internet each year   148.3 million

Percent of all travel reservations made on the internet           57 %

Percent of same day hotel reservations made from a smartphone      65 %

Facebook has some 1.11 billion monthly active users, as of March 2013. The number is up 23 % from last year.

Facebook has 751 million users checking the social network from their mobiles, as of March 2013. The number of users have increased 54%, from one year earlier.

Currently, on an average, people like 4.5 billion items daily on Facebook, up 67% from August last year.

People are sharing more and more on Facebook. On an average, some 4.75 billion pieces of content are shared daily on the social network, up 94% from 2.45 billion in August 2012.

There were 8 million local business pages on Facebook in June 2012. Fast forward a year, and the number is 16 million currently; a 100% jump.

Twitter has 500 million users with 200 million active

Over 460k new accounts created every day, 177 million tweets sent per day, + 182% in mobile Twitter users in the past year.

And then there is YouTube.

Some of you might be saying, YouTube, I don’t have a cute kitten, why would I use YouTube?

YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet with 1 billion users and 4 billion uses per day

¨      More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month

¨      Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on 

YouTube—that's almost an hour for every person on Earth, and 50% more than last year

Should you upload videos for your property – Absolutely!

I have given you some amazing statistics which should urge you to consider more social media but you might be asking – How?  How do I begin and benefit fully from social media.  We look further into this in future episodes.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Bill Gates

In the meantime if you have any interesting stories about social media and would like to share, or have any questions or feedback you can leave them in the comments section of the show notes.