The right strategy when using social media marketing for hotels can help to increase your bookings, increase awareness, see an uptick in clientele returning to your resort, engage with guests, and ultimately exponential growth for your business.

In short, social media marketing is your ticket to taking your hotel or resort to the next level online.

Social media marketing for hotels is a different beast than online marketing for other industries, however.

While you can find a lot of social media marketing tips on the web, it’s hard to find this advice specific to the hotel industry.

Without further ado, here are 37 important do’s and don’ts to help you master social media marketing for hotels. To make this easier to digest, the tips are broken down into  the various categories that your social media marketing strategy entails:

Your Time

1. Don’t launch your brand on a social media platform if you won’t have time to properly maintain an active presence on the site.
2. Don’t forget to include any special days or upcoming events in your social media content calendar so that you can most effectively promote these events via social media.
3. Do consider timing when posting social media content. To ensure that your posts are seen by your audience, know the most effective times to post to achieve optimal levels of engagement with your social media content.
4. Don’t forget about the weekends when scheduling your social media content. Your audience still engages with content on Saturdays and Sundays!
5. Do monitor your social media channels on a regular basis for comments, compliments, and complaints so that you can promptly respond to this feedback.
6. Don’t skimp on resources. Designate someone to stay up-to-date with the latest industry news so that social media content surrounding this subject can be created. You’ll also want someone else to be responsible for regularly posting social media content and promptly responding to customers’ feedback on social media.

Your Channels

8. Don’t spread yourself too thin by choosing to be a part of too many social media channels.
9. Do take the time to review the demographics of each social media platform to best determine which platforms will be best for your business.
10. Don’t blast the same social media updates across every platform that you have a presence on.
11. Don’t have incomplete social media profiles. Not only should they be branded, but they should tell what your business is all about.
12. Do be sure to include a link to your website and important contact information in all of your social media profiles.

Your Content

14. Do put effort into crafting high quality, relevant content to share on social media.
15. Don’t forget to add some variety to the types of content that you share on social media. Your content mix could include infographics, images, links to blog posts, a list of upcoming events near your hotel, tips, and videos.
16. Do use visuals. You only have a split second to capture your audience’s attention on social media, and using the right visuals can help you to accomplish this.
17. Don’t get too wordy with your social media posts. Keep your content quick and to the point so that it’s easy to digest.
18. Do re-share others’ content. It’s a powerful way to build connections and show support for influencers in your industry.
19. Don’t find a good article on the web and play it off as your own. Copying content can get you into some serious trouble, cause you to lose credibility with your audience, and hurt your search strategy.
20. Do give proper credit for content when credit is due.

Your Social Media Etiquette

21. Do realize you are what you share on social media. Keep in mind that everything you put out there on social media is a representation of what your business is all about.
22. Don’t come off as too needy by constantly asking your audience to “please retweet” your content or “like” your Facebook page.
23. Do be cognizant of how frequently you publish content on social media. While you want to have an active presence, you also don’t want to turn your audience off by over-doing it.
24. Don’t delete negative comments about your business. One of the smartest social media marketing for hotels tactics is to promptly respond to this feedback and attempt to professionally resolve the issue.
25. Do be transparent with your social media posts. This will help to earn you trust from your audience.
26. Don’t make all of your social media posts about promoting your hotel. Instead, keep in mind the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of your social media posts should be to entertain and inform your audience, and 20 percent can be reserved for the goods and services that you provide.
27. Do make a point to proofread content before publishing it on social media. One of the fastest ways to lose credibility with your audience is to share content with spelling errors and grammar mistakes.
28. Don’t go overboard with hashtags. Instead, limit yourself to 2 or 3 relevant, well-researched hashtags.
29. Do use a combination of links to direct traffic to your website and hashtags to help you gain more exposure for your posts.
30. Don’t engage with controversial or questionable content. This has the potential to land you dealing with a social media blunder.
31. Do respect your audience by responding promptly and professionally to their comments on social media.

Your Social Media Marketing Team

32. Don’t just hand over the social media reigns to your 22 year-old intern because his generation knows much more about social media networking than you do.
33. Do take the time to carefully find a person or group of individuals that are experienced, capable, and have the time to dedicate to your social media marketing strategy.
34. Do be careful about which employees you allow to have access to your social media accounts.
35. Don’t assume that everyone within your organization knows what constitutes acceptable social media marketing behavior. Create a social media marketing policy that clearly spells out your guidelines and what the repercussions will be for breaking policy.
36. Do use a social media marketing calendar that can be accessed globally by your social media marketing team so that efforts are not duplicated.

After reading through this list, you hopefully were able to identify some ways that you could immediately improve your social media marketing for hotels strategy. Maybe you even found that you were guilty of some of the social media don’ts.

If you’re looking for a social media marketing partner that can take your hotel or resort to the next level, we want to talk to you.

At LYFE Marketing, we help businesses of all sizes with their social media management and social media advertising needs, which ultimately result in increased awareness, more website traffic, and increased lead generation for our clients.

With so many people these days turning to the internet for hotel recommendations, you can’t afford to have a mediocre social media presence.

We also recommend you download our free social media strategy ebook, which shares our proven and effective strategy for increasing your social media presence and getting results.