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Why Your Hotel Should Jump On The Instagram Bandwagon

This is a great article just released by the guys at STAAH.

Don’t worry if this all sounds too daunting, we are here to help and as always make things easy, to save you oodles of time and confusion in the process. It also comes back to monitoring and tracking results so you can rest assured that you are getting the attention you set out to attract in the first place.

Why Instagram deserves some of your attention is because it has captured the attention of millions of users.

People spend between 3-7hrs on social media a day which makes this a must-have marketing tool for any savvy hotel operator.

With 700 million monthly active users and 400 million active daily users, sharing 95 million photos daily. Engaged users love travel and seek authentic experiences and local insights in a simple and beautiful visual format.

After all, our subconscious mind, which runs 95% of our lives and core decisions, operates primarily in images.

That, in essence, is why hoteliers need to jump on the Instagram bandwagon – it’s a ready audience waiting to be wooed by beautiful visuals and videos of your place and location.

TIP: Set up your business account using your business email address, not as prompted to login using your Facebook account.


Top Tips to Insta-Success


Put together a content strategy

What will you post? Where will you get visuals and videos from? You don’t have to create everything yourself. Share content already created.

Get guests to engage

Prompt them to tag you in their posts. Likewise, you should tag them.

Get familiar with hashtags

Branded hashtags. Hashtags to follow. How to use them? When to use them? Where in a post to place them?

Website Link in bio

You cannot add a clickable web link in your Instagram posts. Make sure your website URL is included in your profile information. It may also pay to create a branded hashtag.

Identify and follow a whole bunch of influencers and guests

In the world of Instagram, more often than not, these people will follow you back. And that’s a key way to build your followers. Always follow your followers back.

Share and repost photos by other users

Including guests, local activity operators, destination marketing companies, travel agents, airlines, etc. Mention their Instagram usernames (eg. @airnewzealand) to engage them. Remember to post consistently (which is important for Instagram), you need to rely on others to provide content for your feed. Download the free Repost App – it makes reposting content with the right credits very simple.

Do a little bit of ‘social spying’

Know what your competition and operators in your areas are saying. It’s a good content source. There are free ‘listening’ tools available that will help you monitor mentions of your brands or that of your competitors to make spying easy.

Go behind the scenes

This really helps to develop the know, like and trust factor with your hotel. It also looks really cool to see the behind the scenes magic, meet the staff, how things run and operate, etc.

Your Instagram feed should tell a story – a visual one

Caption language should be friendly, engaging and personable to show brand personality. There’s nothing like pushy sales rhetoric to put off potential guests and push them towards the ‘unfollow’ button.

Be personal

Show guests your property, the rooms, the views and the facilities. But don’t make the posts only a sales pitch for your hotel.

Get creative

Show things from a different perspective. It’s quirky and engaging.

Engagement is key

Monitored via the likes, shares and comments your gram gets. Instagram algorithm features posts in feeds based on the likelihood that the user will be interested in the content. So if more people are engaging with your post, the platform pushes it to a larger audience.

Use videos, live stories and Instagram stories

Moving content gets great traction from users. Also pays to embed your Instagram videos into your blog or content – Instagram has an easy feature that allows you to do this.

Harness the power of apps

There are a number of free and paid apps available to help you find, edit and repost images.

Get promoted with Influencers

It is ok, even important, to treat influencers (with a big fan following) to a free stay or some pampering in order for them to post flattering grams about you.

Again, if this all sounds too daunting, we are here to help and as always make things easy. We have easy social media packages to help ensure you are not missing out on this great platform.

Contact us to find out more

Read the original STAAH article here.


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