Before you can create any effective marketing campaign for your hotel, you need data about your audience. You need to know who your audience is, what they do, what their desires are and what they think of your hotel. This information can be used to create stellar marketing strategies that help you get more bookings.
An effortless way to gather this information is by using social media monitoring tools.
They do exactly what their name suggests: they monitor or ‘listen’ to your audience on social media. These tools can also be valuable after the start of the campaign, because they will show you how your marketing methods are faring.
The question, of course, is which tools are the best and which ones suit your needs. Unfortunately, trawling through pages of search results and sites’ About Our Product pages can eat up hours or even days of your time.
So we’ve done it for you. In this article, we’re going to list our 8 essential social media monitoring tools for hotels.
Let’s go.
Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media marketing tools out there today, and it’s that way for a reason. It’s an incredibly flexible tool and you can do so many things with it, including social media monitoring.
One of Hootsuite’s biggest features is called ‘streams’. You can first create tabs for your hotel’s Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, WordPress and Instagram social media accounts. Then, under the tabs, you can create streams for each network.
For example, for Twitter, you can create streams like ‘Mentions’, ‘Retweets’, ‘Search’, ‘Keywords’ and ‘Lists’. The benefits of this are clear- it’s an easy way to put all your social profiles in one place, so you don’t have to endlessly flick back and forth between them looking for new customer feedback. Instead, you can stay on top of your hotel’s online reputation and leverage social media to boost your hotel’s bookings.
You will be able to observe all these streams (monitoring your audience) side by side, as you can see above. You will also be able to create analytics reports to monitor the effectiveness of your social media efforts. Sounds pretty good, right?
If you’re looking for a more advanced social listening option, there is uberVU. This feature lets you monitor your presence on other places like forums, news sites and blogs, along with social media. It accesses data from over 100 million sources.
To gain access to uberVU, you’ll need to sign up for the Enterprise plan. The other plans available are Free and Pro which costs $8.99 per month.
Social Mention is a free social media monitoring tool that resembles a search engine.
All you have to do is type your hotel’s name in the search field. Then, it shows you what people are saying about you on 100+ websites. These include sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, WordPress and more. It will find the most popular hashtags, users and keywords associated with your hotel too. You can find out what people love to talk about when it comes to your hotel- and maybe what they don’t love so much!
Social Mention will also tell you how passionate people are about your hotel. This means how likely to mention you again, how often they mention you, the sentiment (which can be positive, negative or neutral) and their social reach.
Mention is a social media monitoring tool that lets you select keywords and set up live alerts for them so that you are informed as soon as they appear. It does what Google Alerts does, but on a colossal scale. It can monitor billions of sources in more than 40 languages.
You can connect your social media accounts to it so that you can reply immediately through Mention’s dashboard. You can also connect your Buffer account and Buffer your replies. Mention displays an influencer score next to the user, which helps you build stronger relationships with people that matter in their fields.
There is a free plan which is great for people who want try out the tool. Paid plans start at $29 and go all the way up to $799.
Curalate focuses on what most social media monitoring tools lack: image tracking. It reads more than 200 million images daily and tells you what people are communicating about your brand through pictures on various social media. Curalate shows you the most popular images your hotel’s audience enjoys engaging with. It also displays the language and keywords they use while sharing images of your products.
It can also be used to track detailed analytics on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr. Pricing information is shared only after contact.
Sproutsocial is a popular social media marketing tool that can be used to monitor—you guessed it—your social media. One of their unique features is the ‘Smart Inbox,’ where messages from your Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Google+ profiles aggregate in one place.
You can set up Sproutsocial to monitor keywords and hashtags. You can even monitor Instagram locations. You can communicate back with these messages using the ‘Smart Inbox’.
Pricing starts at $59 and goes up to $500.
Tagboard lets you monitor hashtags on Facebook, Vine, Flickr, Instagram, Twitter and Google+. It’s perfect for hotels that utilize a branded hashtag, as you can see how and when people are using it. You can also monitor how your competitors’ hashtags are being used.
Tagboard is free to use, but you can pay for certain advanced features. Unfortunately, pricing information is available only after contact.
Radian6 from Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be used to monitor the social media activity of your audience on over 650 million sources. These include Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, news sites, blogs and more.
Radian6 doesn’t just display social media activity, it also analyses it to present insights such as sentiment, demographics, trends, intent, and more.
You can respond to this activity in real time, giving you a jump on competitors who know less about their guests and have less access to instant updates. Pricing starts at $1000 per month, so this tool is only for those of you who manage very large or widely talked-about properties.
If you want to build a powerful blog for your hotel, you should be using Buzzsumo to monitor content. On Buzzsumo, you can type in keywords and find the most shared content (on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus and Pinterest) containing them.
You can also track your competitors’ content with Buzzsumo and find influencers who share them. Alerts can be set up so that you are informed about fresh content published by competitors and chosen authors. Overall, the tool helps you create better content to promote your hotel.
You can use the free version, which is pretty useful but displays a limited number of results and doesn’t let you export data. For the paid version, pricing starts at $99 and goes all the way to $999.
These are the most essential social media monitoring tools for hotels. Go through all of them, compare them with your goals, and select the ones that will suit your hotel best. You can then use them to monitor your past, present and future guests’ activity on social media, and actively manage your hotel’s online reputation – simple!
Most of the paid tools come with free plans or trials, so you should be able to test them out first. This data will help you build a solid foundation for your social media marketing strategy.
Did we forget to list any essential social media monitoring tools for hotels? Which of the above do you use? Please leave your comments below.
