Tag Archives: Facebook

9 ways to manage multiple hotel Facebook pages

Posted on by
Reply

A common question for larger hotel groups is whether to have a single brand Facebook page or a Facebook page for each individual hotel.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both but if you decide to go for the option of having a page for each hotel there are ways you can ensure a consistent and high-quality brand experience.

1. Be clear on what you are using social media to achieve within the business
For example, is it for brand marketing, local promotions, customer service, market research? This may vary between hotels and between the main brand social spaces. For example, local hotels may use their Facebook pages to offer restaurant promotions to non-residential guests.

2. Ensure the local team has the skills to deliver
First define the skills a community manager in individual hotels needs to have, then conduct regular skills audits of the team to understand what skills they have and where they need support to perform their jobs well.

3. Work as a team
Have regular meetings with community managers from your individual hotels. As it is likely your hotels will be spread out geographically, regular face-to-face meetings won’t be possible. Set up a private online community space where the community managers from every hotel can meet and discuss issues. Someone from the brand team should act as the community manager for this group.

4. Encourage positive contributions
These private communities can fail if members just show off, are unhelpful or go completely off topic. But rather than set strict rules or delete posts, take a positive approach – regularly demonstrate the kind of approach you want in the team community by highlighting and commenting on positive contributions.

5. Share best practice with team members
Support the team by providing insight and research such as competitor and customer insight which can help members do their jobs better. Encourage team members to share their successful experiences in the team community space.

Collate the insights from each hotel Facebook page into a report and share with all parties every month. Highlight learnings to support the team moving forward. Ensure you have a the brand team have admin access to all Facebook pages.

6. Solve problems together
Encourage team members to share their challenges and problems with the private group. As the community manager you need to actively help solve their problems.

Initially staff may be reluctant to do this, but as the community matures, members will come forward with potential solutions. If they don’t you should try to find people who can help.

It is important to build a trusting atmosphere so people feel comfortable talking about issues.

7. Encourage localism within a brand context
Customers often choose a particular hotel within a hotel group because of the individual experience it offers – you can provide a seamless experience by reflecting these attributes in the hotel’s Facebook page. Are they all designed the same or are they individual – do you have a consistent logo or individual logos?

Empower community managers from individual hotels to act in their own way, but within a brand framework. It is important to be clear on your brand framework – what is the overall narrative – and how does this work with individual hotel brand narratives?

8. Develop processes which are agile and can adapt quickly
There is little point in creating complex brand guidelines or process manual if when something proves not to work it takes months to change – you may have missed an opportunity.

You will need a way of documenting activity, but this should be kept simple. Focus mainly on simple principles on which team members can act rather that pre-defined rules. Empower your staff to act – but hold them responsible for what they do.

9. Always focus on your customer
Break down the silos between hotels and departments to ensure they work together putting the customer at the heart of all activity.

Put yourself in a position of significant influence in social media
Download our FREE whitepaper on developing your hotel’s social media strategy

 

Facebook: fans, likes, posts and comments… what’s really important for brand managers?

Posted on by
Reply

Facebook logo and thumnbs up

As a marketer, you know big numbers usually impress when presenting results.

Traditionally, thousands of ‘fans’ or Facebook page views are key metrics when relating success.

While these are indicators, the social web makes deriving meaning from these numbers more complex.

Facebook Insights is great, but it chucks a lot of data at you that has to be analysed and used in the right way – the simplest thing to do is find the ‘big numbers’ to impress. But these aren’t always the most meaningful figures.

So what information is really important if you’re a brand or organisation running a Facebook page?

1. Likes

  • What are they?
    Facebook users can ‘like’ your page but they can also ‘like’ comments and posts made on your page or showing in their own or friends news feeds.
  • How important are they?
    ‘Likes’ are the simplest social currency in Facebook – when related to posts and comments, they are a good indication of engagement with your brand and tehy do generate brand awareness as they have a viral quality (they show up in people’s tickers and news feeds).

People who like your page are classed as ‘fans’…

2. Fans

  • What are they:
    Facebook fans are simply people who have ‘liked’ your page. This doesn’t include people who may have ‘liked’ a comment or a post on or about your page.
  • How important are they?
    Fans can ‘like’ a page without even visiting it – they may see a Facebook like ad and click ‘like’ in the moment, but never visit the page or – crucially – engage with it. You still have a route to these fans – so we’re not suggesting fans aren’t important, simply that high fan numbers alone aren’t as meaningful as many people think they are. Nice big fan numbers don’t automatically mean increased awareness, engagement or sales – so be wary. Fan numbers alone don’t account for reach and the social media marketers ‘holy grail’ – engagement. It’s easy to generate a lot of ‘likes’ of a brand page – whether those people end up as meaningful advocates – or buyers – is another matter.

Posts
Judging the success of your posts is more complicated than it first appears. Obviously, likes, shares and comments will tell you if a post has gone down well with your fans or not – but this isn’t the whole story.

To truly understand your audience, you need to analyse the content of your posts, the time of day they were posted, the type of post (photo, link, text, question etc) and you need to categorise your own posts on a weekly or monthly basis. You’ll soon build up a picture of what makes your audience tick and you’ll be able to optimise your engagement with them to fully maximise engagement with your Facebook page.

Comments and shares
Comments and shares from fans on and about your posts tell you an amazing amount about your audience. Don’t just count numbers here – look at what they are saying and feed this insight back into your editorial plan.

Where are you fans interacting with each other in your comments? What can you learn from this for further postings?

Remember – comments are the start of a conversation with you from potential brand advocates. Don’t just blanket ‘like’ all comments on a post – it’s meaningless and demeans the effort the people posting have made. Actually respond to them – don’t be scared to have a conversation – they’ll love you for it.

 

How many fans should we have on our Facebook page?

Posted on by
Reply

One of the first questions any marketer will ask in the first stages of setting up a business Facebook page is ‘how many fans should we have?’ or ‘how many fans do we need?’

This is a more complicated question than you might think and it’s not just a numbers game. Competitor fan pages offer a wealth of insight for any brand and it is easy to get distracted by the number of fans a competitor has and use this benchmark as the sole measure of success.

However, it’s difficult to see the tactics they employed to get those fans – and how much money they spent to get them. High fan numbers don’t necessarily mean a brand has a large and loyal following.

Advertising for fans

Some campaigns are less about true brand popularity and more about the budget a company puts behind pushing a page via Facebook ads.

75% of Facebook fans have signed up with pages after invitations or ads from brands (DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research in September 2010). If this is the route you are going down, the benchmark amount of fans you ‘should’ have can most accurately be calculated using estimated CPC’s and conversion rates.

Buying fans

Something to be avoided, this less scrupulous technique uses third party companies to buy a set number of fans. The dangers here are twofold, firstly,  the fans often aren’t real people, just fake or automated accounts and secondly, even if they are real you are ultimately buying someone who isn’t interested in your brand. It’s a quick win and it will make your account ‘appear’ more popular in the short term – but ultimately, it’s a meaningless ‘big’ number.

Targeting is key

Targeting is key to growing real fans. You may get more get more fans quickly and cheaply by blanket targeting everybody but ideally, you want to attract your target market. Promote your page via your existing communication channels and if you are utilising advertising be very specific with your demographic criteria and interest selection.

All about the engagement

Rather than focusing on the numbers alone, your resources are better invested developing a meaningful relationship with the ‘true’ fans you do have. Providing them with great content will ultimately increase your interaction rates, and therefore the reach of your page allowing for organic growth. You are also more likely to identify your brand advocates who will happily share your content with their network.

The benefits to the marketer of having a thriving community of fans and advocates are countless. Instead of sifting through spam, irrelevant posts and comments you can learn about your customers and what they think about your brand, conduct real time customer service and most importantly develop a long term relationship with the people who matter.

So how many fans should we have on our facebook page? Simply however many want to be there.

Rate This! The emotional side of rating systems

Posted on by
Reply

I have been thinking a lot recently about online ratings systems and how we use them to express our feelings about a piece of content.

It is quite old news but I think Youtube’s decision to move away from a 5 star rating system to a simple thumbs up thumbs down system was really interesting.

The 5 star rating system largely resulted in viewers voting videos 5 star or 1 star. The graph of star ratings for Youtube was so binary it made a lot of sense to change the rating system to reflect that. Even now the majority of videos you will see on Youtube will have like votes far outweighing the dislike votes.

I guess the response to a video you don’t like is more likely to be closing the tab rather than spending the time to rate it.

Youtube Rating Graph
A graph showing how votes in a five star rating system were distributed on Youtube

Facebook has taken this system even further and only offers a like button with no option for negative feedback. Presumably this is because Facebook wants to encourage positive behavior and is aware that more people will rate something positively than will take the time to be negative.

These two networks might lead you to thinking the 5 star rating system is dead and that simplification is the answer. However it really depends on the type of content and the presentation of the system. For example Trip advisor’s five star rating system is presented with the semantic terms and radio buttons rather than a clear set of stars. As you can see below the ratings of a typical item tend to have a wider distribution spread.

Trip Advisor uses semantics to anchor it’s rating system
By anchoring the rating system with emotional terms it makes the rater think about which word best aligns with their feelings towards their experience rather than simply if they liked it or not.

It is also worth noting the vast difference between experience a 2 minute Youtube video and spending several days on holiday. The holiday is much more likely to create a variety of opinions that requires a finer degree of scale as opposed to the consumption of a short video.

The rating system can also be integral to the experience of the content itself. For example a new social network Canv.as has an interesting take on the like/dislike rating system.

Canvas upvote rating system

Canv.as is a network about images with users posting funny/interesting pictures and then remixing, editing and responding to them in kind. Users can downvote any item with a thumbs down but are given a choice from 9 upvotes.

Each upvote is worth the same and in terms of rating it is no different to the thumbs up of a Youtube video. However by giving each upvote it’s own visual identity the user is able to reflect the reason for their rating without needing to leave a comment.

Whether the rated image made them happy, shocked or laugh out loud it can all be encompassed with one vote. It allows for a wider range of expression without needing the user to think of where the piece of content ranks in comparison to others.

It is also worth noting that these are not just buttons to click on each image but must be dragged and dropped onto the content which is a much more deliberate and satisfying experience than pressing a button.

Giving your users a rating system can be much more than giving them a set of numbers with which to rate your content. The experience of how they can rate and how the system is presented can dramatically change behaviour. I would be really interested to hear if you have seen any sites that have a unique or different system for rating content.

This blog post was written by Glenn White while at Qube Media. Glenn now works for Brandwatch.