Five metrics your hotel social media manager should be reporting on
January 13, 2020
Not sure what your social media presence is doing for your bottom line? Make sure you know the five metrics your hotel social media manager should be reporting on.
Many marketers measure social media success like this:
- How many likes or followers do our social media channels have?
- Do we post X number of times a week?
- Do the photos look professionally done?
See a problem here? No? Well, here’s the catch: The answers to these questions won’t actually provide you with any valuable information on how successful your social media efforts are. Likes and followers are an indication of potential organic reach. Looking at your number of posts is like counting how many flyers you’ve printed out: You can have hundreds but they’re useless unless seen. And professional photography isn’t necessarily what your potential guests are resonating with.
So what should you be focusing on to determine whether your social platforms are actually getting you results? Read on for the five metrics your hotel social media manager should be reporting on.
Reach
The beauty of digital marketing is the ability to definitively measure how many people have seen your content. No more guess-work. No more estimates. Since reach is the number of unique users who have seen your content, you get a sense of the impact of your efforts. Funneling out hundreds of pieces of content per year is useless unless you can define how many people have actually seen it. To put this into perspective: A single post can reach 10,000 people, and 20 posts can reach a grand total of 400 people. Let that sink in.
Traffic
For Facebook (and when we say Facebook, we also mean Instagram), the preferred measure here is Landing Page Views. This is the number of times people have clicked on external links and actually waited for a web page to load. However, this can only be measured if you have the Facebook Pixel planted on your website. If you have the ability to install a Facebook Pixel, this is an absolute must. It’s Facebook’s way of tracking and retargeting users that have visited your website, and if you’re not taking advantage of it, you are 100% giving away potential business. If you don’t have the ability to install a Pixel, then your KPI here is Outbound Link Clicks. While not as accurate, it’s at least an indicator of people that have expressed enough interest to leave Facebook to view your content.
Conversions
Similar to Landing Page Views, this can only be measured if the Pixel is installed on your pages—and when installed correctly, you can track the number of times someone has booked a stay through your ads as well as how much the value of each stay was. The value is important here because the length of each stay and the number of rooms are a much better indicator of success than the number of stays booked. One night for one room has a much different ROI than 7 nights and 2 rooms. To put that into perspective, we’ve run booking ad campaigns that have resulted in 300x the ROI but had fewer number of stays booked than previous campaigns.
Demographics
Who exactly is engaging with your social content? Where are they from? How old are they? Do these demographics match the customer base you know is true of your hotel? If not, that tells you one of two things: You’re either reaching the wrong people on social OR you have a potential new audience you haven’t taken advantage of yet. Either way, this type of information is an invaluable resource for your overall marketing strategy. While Facebook cannot tell you specifics and will not provide statistics if the audience is too small, it can provide you with generalities like DMA locations, age ranges, device usage, among others.
Engagements
This is the standard and most visible measure of success when looking at your content. However, the key here is watching for quality over quantity. Yes, the number of engagements on posts does impact its potential organic reach. However, not all engagements are created equal in the eyes of the News Feed algorithm. Comments are king and shares are key. DMs and Post Saves are also great forms of measuring quality engagement that are often overlooked.
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Casual Fridays is a digital marketing agency providing world-class social media experiences for its clients and their audiences. To date, we’ve delivered successful social strategies and ad campaigns for more than 200 hotels and resorts from San Francisco to New York City to the Caribbean. If you’re unhappy with the results of your social media efforts—or worse, you have no idea what your results are—we’re happy to help. Click here to contact us.