What Is Social Advocacy? How Can It Work For Your Hotel?

The Hospitality Industry is one of the most crowded sectors, and brand positioning is one of the most important factors when it comes to getting your hotel seen and bookings made. Businesses that don’t make an impact online will quickly be forgotten.

Social Media Advocacy is a type of Content Marketing, and is the process of using personal social media channels to promote and share your hotel’s posts and content with friends and associates. It is a process that takes time, unlike direct marketing you may not see the results immediately – but it’s an important element in the foundation of a long-term strategy.

You need community engagement to reach potential customers, but advocacy of your brand should start with you and your staff.

WHAT ARE THE GOALS OF THIS PROGRAM?

When it comes to Content Marketing, the three major goals are: Lead Generation, Education and Brand Awareness. Social networking sites allow you to connect with interested audiences across the world, and give them reasons why your hotel brand is the one they should chose to book with.

To fully utilise social advocacy, you need to address three main areas:

1. Personal Advocacy – Where you personally share your company’s posts, blogs, tweets, etc.
2. Employee Advocacy – Where your employees share the company content in their private social media networks.
3. Ambassador Advocacy – Where you have a group of dedicated followers or ‘fans’ who share your brand’s content in their personal social media channels.

However, there is an important balance that needs to be addressed when using social marketing – and that is perception. If you are seen to be sharing every single post, blog or tweet, with no regard for the content, then the impact of your contribution is diminished – if your audience don’t think you care about what it is you’re putting forward to them, they won’t bother engaging with it.

You can share often if you like – but you must like what you share, it must be something that either you yourself find interesting, or think your personal circle will. Over promoting, or promoting sub-standard content could see your audience un-liking or un-following your page, or hiding your posts, which defeats the point – in general, ‘46% of people will unfollow a brand on social for posting too many promotional messages.’ (Source: SproutSocial)

STARTING FROM THE TOP BUILDS VALUABLE CONFIDENCE

Social Media Advocacy works best when there is a clear example of strong leadership – if the highest ranking members of your business don’t feel that the content is worth sharing, then it will affect the motivations of the team – why should they share posts that the higher management don’t appear to believe in?

Social Networking Sites, especially those such as Facebook, are growing ever more focused on creating communities, and sharing interesting, relevant content. If your hotel is simply advertising its self, and not offering anything of value – or opportunities for people to discuss and enjoy your brand attributes – then your channels will be penalised, and your content won’t be shared.

You need to believe in your hotel brand – so do your management team and staff – if everyone from the top down is promoting and endorsing the business; it will help build consumer confidence in your brand.

HOW TO DEVELOP A SOCIAL ADVOCACY PROGRAM

Once you’ve decided to create an Advocacy Program for Social Media Marketing, it’s important that you understand what you need, and the best ways to implement it:

1. DECIDE ON YOUR GOALS.

What is it that you want to achieve? Are you trying to raise your brand awareness? Recruit new skilled workers? Increase lead generation and sales? If you try to do everything at once, you will send out a mixed message and dilute the impact. You need to decide on what has priority, and aim to achieve your desired goals one at a time.

2. CHOOSE WHAT YOU WILL MEASURE AND HOW

Look at what you’ve chosen to achieve, and decide what data you will be collecting to measure your success or failure with the project. Once you’ve decided this, you must determine what software is best capable of recording it and set up the parameters accordingly.

3. BRAINSTORM AND ESTABLISH GUIDELINES

This is an opportunity to sit down with your employees and discuss your hotel with them – find out how they see it, and develop the ‘voice’ you want to use to generate additional outside interest in your content. Some of your staff may not be social media savvy, and this is your opportunity to provide them with training and encouragement.

It is important that you provide firm guidelines for expected behaviour – if you want your employees to share your posts, then allowing them to do so in the working day is a good idea, but they must realise that this is not permission to waste time. They should be gently reminded that this is a formal exercise – not playtime.

4. DECIDE ON WHAT SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS YOU INTEND TO USE.

There are a huge number of social media platforms to choose from, and it’s important that you concentrate your efforts where you are going to get the best results. This may mean that you have a stronger presence on some platforms than others, but it will entirely depend on your target demographic. If your potential audience aren’t using a particular social media platform, and it looks like there is no engagement from any of your competitors there either, then you need to decide if it’s worth expending your energy on it.

5. ALLOW YOUR EMPLOYEES TO CHOOSE THE ROLES THEY ARE BEST SUITED FOR

There are a number of different roles within a social advocacy program, and some of your staff may be better suited for particular ones. Some may not feel comfortable engaging in comments, but are happy to share or ‘like’, others may enjoy engaging in conversation and leading them to the posts or offering customer service advice. It is important to work with your employees to ensure that they are placed in the optimal position to garner the best responses.

6. MONITOR YOUR TEAM

This is not a program that you can just start and let run – it needs to be monitored, not just for the analytics, but to ensure that your employees are sharing appropriate content, and that your brand is being enhanced by their contributions. Having regular meetings with your team will allow you to address any issues (which may help negate any discontent that employees may feel), praise those who are doing well, and encourage those who aren’t – it gives you the opportunity to evaluate your team, and swap roles, should it be required.

It may be effective to offer your team an incentive – creating friendly competition can increase your employee’s drive and motivation, and in turn garner better results.

7. ADAPT

It is unlikely that the program will work flawlessly first time – and even if it works well, monitoring the team and the results will allow you to make changes where necessary. Just because a plan and guidelines were put in place to start with, doesn’t mean that they have to be rigidly adhered to – having a flexible attitude and quick responses well allow you to engage with current trends and keep your hotel brand in the public consciousness.

Social Media Advocacy is not an overnight process, it takes time to set up, build and engage, but it is worth the effort as not only does it increase your reach and brand recognition, but it encourages stronger ties and growth with your employees, and makes social media work for your hotel.