Twitter Marketing for Hotels: How One Tweet Increased Engagement by 3000%

I manage the social media accounts for 12 extended stay hotels in the USA. What I’m about to share with you is for anyone in online sales in the hospitality industry.

Through one story, you will learn about the tools and tactics I use to drive traffic and bookings through Twitter.

Story

On September 26, 2014, I was doing my usual work — scheduling a post through HootSuite, a social media management platform, for optimal hours on the Facebook pages for all 12 hotels. Nothing special.

I noticed a particular buzz going on in my “Champaign” keyword filter stream.

See, in Hootsuite, there is a neat keyword filter tool that allows me to see all the tweets containing specific keywords. For the 12 hotels, I have the corresponding cities listed as keywords so that I can keep a bead on the local news and happenings. For example, we have three hotels in the Greenville, SC market so I have “Greenville SC” listed as a keyword phrase.

That day, the “Champaign” (IL) stream was bustling around the hashtags #CollegeCrazeTour and #CollegeCrazeUIUC.

What’s this? I thought to myself. After two minutes of clicking and reading I found that College Craze is one of the biggest traveling grass-roots college parties organized primarily through Twitter. Over 1,000 college students attend.

Huh. That’s interesting.

Time Out

Before I continue with the story I need to tell you about another important tool I use for hotel digital marketing. I utilize a Wordpress blog, AffordableHotelBlog.com, for content marketing and SEO (ranking on the first page of Google/Bing). On the blog, I write about local travel options and tips featuring the highest value for the lowest price. Of course, while I add links to our booking website and make a good pitch for our product, I do try to remain as objective and useful as possible.

Anyways, on the Affordable Hotel Blog I have an archive for Champaign-Urbana, IL with articles such as Champaign’s Most Affordable Hotel and Cheapest of the Cheap: Hotels in Champaign Near Campus. These articles contain a strong call to action to pick up the phone and call our hotel directly to book.

Time In

Equipped with this back log of content useful for Champaign travelers, I posted the following tweet:

I didn’t think anything of it. Just another random tweet that may result in a click or two (typical). I sent 4 or 5 other tweets that day.

Within a couple minutes, the founders of #CollegeCraze retweeted the tweet to over 12k followers. In turn, their followers retweeted the link as well.

The next day, I checked the click stats of the link. 31. Right on [social media marketer fuzzy feeling].

I hop over to blog analytics to see what the activity was. Here were some metrics that gave me an idea of what visitors did:

Bounce rate: 55.56%

Of those folks that came from the tweet, half of them didn’t stay on the site for very long at all.

Pages/session: 1.56

For those that did stay, they poked around to another page or two.

Avg. Session Duration: 01:32

The visitors read articles on AffordableHotelBlog.com for an average of a minute and a half.

Social media engagement is great and web traffic is awesome, but the big question still remains: did it result in any sales?

Answer: no.

Why

The reason why the tweet did not result in any sales was because of a broken traceable sales funnel.

In my case with the College Craze tweet, the sales funnel broke off at the point of referral from the blog to the hotel website or phone. Without a promo code, I was unable to track the reservations back to my tweet. That weekend, $791 came in. But I can’t confidently say that it was a direct result of my tweet.

3 things I would do differently in the future:

1. Have a quick-response promo code generation system in place. If I pick up on an opportunity that requires a fast turnaround, I need to have a system in place to generate a deeply targeted promo code, quickly.
2. Place the promo code only on the blog. Any sales with the promo code meant that they came from the blog, where the targeted content is. Plus, I would save character space in my tweets.
3. Place the promo code in an email capture pop-up. Visitors came to the blog for savings originally. So a pop-up with a “Knock off $20 before you book your hotel” message is well worth an email address. Plus, in a month or two they might be interested in another promo code.