Three Powerful Social Media Indicators That are Overlooked

Social Media's Impact on the Hospitality Industry

In recent years we have been noticing the rise of social media channels as a way for businesses to communicate and engage with their customers. According to Statista, social media is predicted to reach around a third of earth's entire population.

Regarding hospitality, social media has become a powerful source of information. Travelers rely on different social media channels to support their decisions and share their experiences, making it definitely one of the most important marketing platforms. The most important transformation that this new wave brought to the marketing worlds is the fact that brands are no longer in control. Brands are on social media with or without the brand contribution.

The most efficient hotel managers distinguish themselves by their capacity to quickly react to market changes and adapt to these changes. They need indicators and adequate measures to evaluate performance in social media.

First Things First: Hoteliers Should Start by Defining Goals and the Right Metrics

The first step for any successful social media strategy is to define goals that establish outcomes and measures. You must be sure that the chosen metrics are reliable, precise and easily obtained. Goals? Brand Awareness? Leads? Engagement? Depending on each objective, you'll need to keep an eye on different indicators and metrics.

After the definition of goals and the right metrics, hoteliers should be able to analyze social media performance and make decisions based on the results. However, there are also some new engagement indicators based on sentiment analysis that can help you to understand your fans reactions on social media channels:

1. Guest Feelings and Emotions on Facebook: Get Relevant Online Consumer Behavior Insights Through New Emoji's

If you invest in unique and relevant content, engagement is the right metric. On Facebook, Likes, Interactions, Shares & Comments are the metrics used to monitor engagement but there is a new feature that can be used as a sentiment analysis to evaluate engagement: dynamic emoji´s reactions. These new reactions emotions can bring relevant data to be analyzed as they represent users emotions when viewing a Facebook post. Moreover, for the very first time, you can now analyze and evaluate negative feelings. For hotels, it is a great way of measuring your guest's satisfaction.

Reach & Engagement Metrics to be Considered When Measuring Emoji's - Facebook users can now choose six distinct emotive reactions: "Like", "Love", "Laugh", "Wow", "Sad", and "Angry". Measuring one by one these innovative emoji's, hoteliers will now be able to refine their messaging in order to get better reactions. Facebook delivers a new analytics page where page managers are able to aggregate these reactions together: emoji's reactions can now be monitored in Facebook insights page:

Three Powerful Social Media Indicators That are Overlooked | By Pedro Colaco— Photo by GuestCentric Systems

Total Number of Reactions - will help you to understand the engagement in the Facebook post.

Positive Reactions - Positive emoji's can help to obtain a better view when guests are expressing agreement, surprise or supporting towards what they really love.

Negative Reactions - Before these new emoji's, the only way to express disagreement was to write a negative comment. Statistically it is more probable that more users pick a negative emoji now than type a negative comment. Basically, being able to isolate those users who select the "angry" or "sad" reaction, and pair them to a comment that they also post, will certainly be of significance to community/page managers.

Sentiment - Percentage of all mentions that are positive, neutral and negative in sentiment.

2. Analyzing #Hashtags Will Empower You to Define New Keywords, Improve SEO and Monitor Your Online Reputation

Today, hashtags are everywhere. A good hashtag can capture the imagination of the online public and help increase social media presence. Hashtags can be also used to understand which keywords are more relevant to identify an idea. That is why it is important to know exactly the words that your guests are using to hashtag your property in their posts, as well as its frequency. Moreover, knowing which keywords are being used as hashtags is also important for organic search results (the listings that appear on a search engine results page) and for writing unique content.

Investing in hashtags on social media channels like Instagram and Twitter, can really boost impressions, make your content more searchable and encourage guests to talk about your hotel experiences and get their feedback. Therefore, hashtags can be used to track conversations for hoteliers' content management and to build a keyword planner strategy. Furthermore, a good hashtag can redefine your online hotel identity, provide you with new ways to engage with your guests and help you to improve customer satisfaction.

Reach and Engagement Metrics to be Considered When Analyzing Hashtags:

Hashtags can be measured on conversations and engagement generated in social media. Measurement can be based on conversations, the experience that guests had in your hotel and all the content generated by hashtags. In order to measure reach (brand awareness) and acquisition metrics (building a relationship), hoteliers must take advantage of the following metrics:

Number and Type of Hashtags Per Post - Understand which type of keywords are used per post.

Keyword Frequency - The number of times that a particular keyword or phrase is found within a brand's social graph. It will help you to define the most used keywords and to understand which is your hotel perception of your guests. Moreover, you can also compare these keywords used in hashtags to understand the traffic driven into your website with the following metrics:

Traffic - Number of visits and visitors' social media drives to your website per period.

Search Visitors - Those who visit your site based on a search query.

Rank Per Keyword - Average position your content earns in a search engine for a specific keyword. You can explore here some of the most successful hashtags reputation management tools here.

3. Uncover Content Meanings and Get More Relevant Data From Guest Reviews Using Content and Sentiment Analysis

We all know how competitive the hotel industry is today. That is why guest experience and satisfaction should always be one of the most important goals for hoteliers: one simple poor review can damage a hotel's ranking. Good reviews mean more visibility and exposure to business, as well as better reputation that increases bookings and revenues. By analyzing bad reviews, hoteliers can improve their performance and customer satisfaction.

However, hoteliers could explore more online reviews and customer feedback by analyzing feedback content and what some keywords really mean. Feedback and online reviews can provide more added value than just star ratings and satisfaction scores. Guests don't rate their experience just with stars, they also express their opinions and expectations and expect you to listen.

By using text analytics and sentiment analysis, hoteliers can make the most out of guests' sentiment and feedback and obtain relevant insights that can make a difference. Moreover, you will be able to create a brand that resonates more with your audience, useful in driving engagement levels, making guests feel connected with you.

In order to improve your customer service or policies based on a negative review, you can act by simply sharing their reviews with the hotel's staff.

Metrics to be Considered When Measuring Comments Reviews

When analyzing guest feedback, it is important to filter through comments and reviews. Not all comments from guests will translate into actions hoteliers need to take. Although it might be a difficult task, hoteliers should analyze the metrics that can bring an added value and have an impact on their business.

That is why, when looking at reviews and comments, hoteliers must identify the key trends in customer´s comments to determine focus of concern. Implementing these initiatives will then ensure that there is a link with customer demands.

There are four essential emotional analysis factors when scanning comments in reviews. Besides the percentage of positive and negative reviews, hoteliers could also monitor the following metrics:

Sentiment:- Percentage of all mentions that are positive, neutral and/or negative in sentiment.

Analyze Customer Emotions by Keywords - You can perform an analysis of keywords (sentiment) for your hotel.

Customer Emphasis - Perceive how their thoughts and opinions were exposed.

Customer Key Issues - Analyze if there is any repetitive subject that guests are always mentioning.

Currently there are some tools like theenginuity or Sodash that can help you to monitor and measure sentiment of your audience, social activity and impact of comments and reviews.

Social media's influence on the traveler's journey has been growing in a very exciting way in the past few years. That's exactly why hoteliers must have at their disposal reliable and timely metrics. They need proper data to monitor their business and make quick decisions whenever they are needed.

Among several metrics that hoteliers track to monitor brand awareness, leads, or conversions, there are some new engagement metrics that should be also included in a social media analysis performance: sentiment analysis indicators. These indicators will enable hoteliers to better monitor their social media performance and get more relevant insights. Better yet, they will help you to fine tune your relationship with your customers in a more meaningful way.