Boosting Hotel Sales With Social Media Analysis

2.4 Boosting Hotel Sales with Social Media
It is not very easy to increase sales solely on replying to a couple of posts from the guests. Though that can be a great way to communicate with guests, there are more factors to look at when trying to increase sales (Bodenlos, 2013). According to Murphy, (2013) each social media network should be treated uniquely, as each has strengths and weaknesses that hoteliers should consider. Murphy also states that it is crucial to know which channels are best for customer communication, brand exposure, customer retention, loyalty and which would be better for search engine optimization, driving traffic to your website and direct selling. Generating more leads and increasing sales requires an exhaustive approach
He states that the sales funnel is not in the shape of a cone, however it is in the form of an escalator instead states the stages as Awareness, Familiarity, Consideration, Purchase and Loyalty. According to Ayyar the Awareness stage is the often neglected social media goal of increasing engagement. At this stage the hotelier must do anything to generate response whether it`s asking questions or asking for feedback. At the Familiarity stage, the customers are familiar with your brand and they must consider your brand when they want to make a purchase. In order to do this he advises to use e-mail auto-responders by looking at audience insights from Facebook and Twitter. Ayyar then states that in the consideration stage, the customer is now thinking of making a purchase. An active YouTube page pushes positive content to the top page so Ayyar advises to use videos as this improves site visibility, traffic and subsequently, reputation even more. Furthermore in the Purchase stage, Ayyar states that the customer has decided to buy from you, but it is important to keep them engaged by cross-selling as this can increase transaction rates. He also believes that marketers should utilise networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest as they all have the ‘buy’ button. At the final stage Ayyar says to use social channels as a form of customer care. He advises to open a
As of October 2015 there were 320 million people who used Twitter and an estimated 1.3 billion registered users (Smith 2015). The interface allows users to post short messages up to 140 characters that can be read by any Twitter user. Users declare the people they are interested in following. They then get notified every time that person posts a new message (called tweets). Unlike most social networking sites such as Facebook, a user being followed by another user does not necessarily have to reciprocate by following them back, which makes the links of the Twitter social network directed (Huberman et al, 2008). Kwak et al (2010) analysed that retweets actually send information to much more people than a source’s immediate followers. He states that people don’t always get information directly from those they follow, but often via retweets. Assuming a tweet posted by a user is seen by all of the user’s followers, Kwak et al (2010) counted the number of additional recipients who are not immediate followers of the original tweet owner. Up to about 1, 000 followers, the average number of additional recipients is not affected by the number of followers of the tweet source, which means that the number of followers a user has does not matter as the tweet is likely to reach a certain amount of people, once the user’s tweet starts to spread via retweets. This shows the power of