Tips To Encourage Your Social Followers To Share Your Content

Whether you are just starting to set up social media profiles, are looking to optimize and enhance, or have mastered social media marketing, hoteliers and their hotels can benefit from learning ways to encourage their social media following to share published content.

We've written several articles regarding why social media presence is a must in today's online marketing world (see Top 10 Social Media Trends in 2011), and several more on what you can share on these channels (see What to Post on Social Media Channels). Now, let's dive into how you can encourage your following to click the +1, like, tweet it, or any other buttons for sharing your online content.

Here are 5 tips for encouraging your social media followers to share your content:

1. Understand your audience – this is key when developing a social media marketing plan. Before you can even decide on what content to write, what channels to use, or how to run your campaign, it's important to know who you're targeting and what kind of content will grab their attention.
2. Write relevant and engaging content – publishing content just to have activity on your social profile is not enough. Making sure your content is relevant to your audience and engaging will help increase your hotel's social engagement factor. The higher social engagement is, the more your followers are willing to share your content and the faster your hotel's brand awareness can spread.
3. Make it easy for them to share – integrating social media sharing tools such as Facebook Like, Google +1, and Tweet badges on your website or blog can help increase content sharing. Be careful not to place too many sharing badges on your site or blog as these can increase your site's download time – which is an important factor to search ranking. Filter social channels carefully and only include social sharing badges for the channels your target audience frequents the most.
4. Create lists/checklists – people love checklists, especially ones that can help them with their traveling decisions. See bonus section below for a couple ideas.
5. Think outside the "hotel" marketing box - don't focus only on sharing information about your hotel or your current special. Try sharing informative content that visitors may find useful when traveling to your destination as well.

Bonus: Here are several ideas of engaging content relevant to travel:

• Traveler's checklists – how to prepare for travel, what to pack, etc.
• Travel deals – list of deals travelers may find useful while in your town, such as coupon to the nearest museum, state fare, etc.
• Traveler's guide to your city – several things to do, places to eat, and top local picks to check out are just several things that a traveler may look for when visiting your area for the first time. Hint: some travelers are budget conscious, and providing free or low-cost things to do in your area can be very attractive.

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Contributed by Teresa Villaruz, Sr. Marketing Specialist, Milestone Internet Marketing