How to Use Social Listening to Succeed In Hotel Reputation Management

In the hospitality world, customer happiness depends prominently on the hotel’s ambiance, service, and support. However, in an online world, social media marketing and social media monitoring plays an integral role in engaging customers and building their connection with the brand. On one side, social networking sites help customers comprehend the brand, whereas, on the other side, they become a medium for customers to express their happiness or grief. And in case a hotel doesn’t pay heed to these comments or not get notified about them in the first place, the hotel’s reputation can be in jeopardy. To understand it better, let’s dive deep into the importance of hotel reputation management.

What is Hotel Reputation Management?

Hotel Reputation Management means to shield your organization from all the negativity that might come your way. Parallelly, it also means emphasizing customer engagement and building brand awareness by getting involved in the conversations happening in your industry. Hence, there are two aspects to focus on whilst working on reputation management:

Physical presence

The kind of service you provide to your customers when they stay at your hotel or come for dining is significant because this is the foundation of your brand image. No social media platform or online community can help you maintain your reputation if you don’t prioritize your customer happiness. This part is entirely in your control, and you know the best way to handle it.

However, you can always ask your customers to share positive feedback online, and in case they have not been content with your services, ask for their suggestions to improve.

Online presence

Online presence covers room and banquet bookings, hotel review sites, and social media platforms. Sometimes, a customer might get upset because he didn’t get the amenities in the hotel you promised during online booking. An upset customer will give you a low rating on TripAdvisor or even write a negative review on Google. However, if you talk to that customer immediately and assure him it won’t repeat, there is a high chance that the customer will visit again.

Why Is It Essential?

In today’s time, customers rely on online reviews, ratings, and word-of-mouth marketing. There are higher chances that a food blogger’s negative remark or the customers’ negative online ratings won’t go unnoticed. And if you don’t do anything about it, there will be a domino effect of unhappy customers on your brand reputation that takes you to the road you won’t like to go.

Schitt’s Creek, the Canadian sitcom show, reflects this significance even better. The Rose motel used to be empty because the caretakers were ignorant. There were no toiletries and housekeeping services. There was no brand awareness. However, when a wealthy business person (who lost his fortune to the big city and came down to Schitt’s Creek) held the motel’s responsibility along with the old caretaker, he focused on providing good services and managing reputation online through influencers. As a consequence, the motel grew and started its chain of Rosebud Motels. Well, the show is fiction, but the realization is tactile.

Source: Schitts Creek Fandom

Source: Schitts Creek Fandom

How Can Social Listening Tools Help in Hotel Reputation Management?

Whether you run an entire hotel chain or just a tiny Airbnb cottage, you would have considered checking reviews on Google and sites like Booking.com to know your ratings. However, these are not the limited sites where customers can express their opinion. What if they make videos or write a blog post stating their unhappiness? Or they share their feedback on platforms where you haven’t signed up yet. How will you control the damage before it goes out of your hand? Well, the social listening tools have come to your rescue.

Watch and get involved in a plethora of conversations

These tools crawl the data across the web and social media platforms and showcase to you the ones where your hashtag or name has been mentioned, even if it is untagged. That way, you can leverage the industry conversations to your benefit by taking prompt action as required. For instance, offer new services to old customers, respond to negative news, resolve issues, educate people about new safety practices in the hotel, and so forth.

Take action on fake accounts

Social media monitoring tools also help you identify fake accounts created with an intention to clog your brand’s goodwill. For instance, while tracking the data when you visit social media accounts that have mentioned your name, you will come to know if it belongs to fraud or a genuine customer.

Learn about industry trends

There can be a new revolution in the industry with disruptive technologies, as it started with budget hotels, breakfast in bed, and other formats. Hence, you can go through the online conversations to know whether customers adore these new formats or, furthermore, if these new formats can be intense competition for your hotel.

Track the prominent social media accounts in one place

As an organization, it’s challenging to open all accounts daily and visit the notifications. Also, customers might not have tagged you while discussing in online communities, so you may never get notified. That’s where a social listening tool helps by highlighting all the conversations on its dashboard with your mentions.

Turn hostile customers into positive ones

As you will track all the conversations on a single dashboard, it’s an excellent opportunity to know about dissatisfied customers’ problems and respond in the least amount of time.

Why Use Mentionlytics for Hotel Reputation Management?

Amidst the horde of social listening tools, you must be wondering what unique characteristics Mentionlytics has to offer? Here are the following:

Know your competitors well

Use our ‘Share of Voice’ feature and remain aware of the strategies your competitor is implementing. Stay top-notch in the game, monitoring their media coverage websites, their collaboration with influencers, magazines, and social media platforms. Know how customers react to their services through social engagement and sentiment analysis data. If they have international branches, then you can track conversations from those locations as well, and maybe open a new opportunity to expand your business and acquire new customers.

Create a strategic tracker

Add your best keywords and hashtags in the tracker to fetch all conversations across the web and social media and know everything said about you. You can also use this tracker to generate marketing leads for your hotel. For instance, if you create a tracker utilizing the keyword ‘discount on hotel rooms,’ you may get several mentions where people ask for recommendations on the city’s best budget hotels.

Create custom reports

This is the utmost priority for your marketing team to develop strategies against the competitors and acquire new customers. Hence, with the Mentionlytics tool, you can customize reports as per your requirement. There are three kinds of reports:

• Top Mentions: It depicts all the conversations that mention your brand.
• Influencer: It includes a list of the top mentioners with high followers.
• Share of Voice: This report will have all the metrics that you need to track your competitors, such as total mentions, their social reach, engagement, sentiment analysis of customers, and a list of top mentioners and websites.

Analyze the sentiments of mentions

Mentionytics is AI-empowered and determines the sentiments behind the conversations quite well. Sometimes, the comments of a customer can be misconstrued by your marketing team, which may further lead to miscommunication. Hence, Mentionlytics make it easy for you to identify and respond accordingly. For instance, you should reply to negative sentiments first in order to avert the crises that may occur if not treated on time.

Make social media strategies

Schedule your campaigns and social media posts through our publishing tool for the time that receives maximum engagement and analyzes their performance. Use our Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA) to know what works in your favor and what not.

Collaborate with top influencers

Mentionlytics dashboard will display a list of top mentioners along with their followers. These are the people who have mentioned your brand in their blogs, tweets, or videos. Thus, based on their level of influence, you may contact them for collaboration on marketing activities to increase your brand’s credibility.

Compare your previous performance

Use our ‘Comparison Switch’ feature to analyze your current performance versus the past one concerning the number of mentions, social reach, and engagement. You can utilize this feature to determine weekly, monthly and quarterly performance.

Set email alerts

Stay notified about all posts where your name is mentioned. This way, you can keep track of positive and negative reviews around your brand.

Find the trending keywords and hashtags

Know which keywords are best at increasing your social reach and engagement, the number of times they have been mentioned, and how customers interpreted them. If a keyword has attracted many negative sentiments, it depicts that you should stop using it in your social media posts or at other places.

To Sum Up

Hotel reputation management is a huge responsibility and can’t be taken care of without utilizing intelligent social listening to share your burden. If you believe Mentionlytics can help you achieve your objectives, sign up for a free trial today!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/how-to-use-social-listening-to-succeed-in-hotel-reputation-management