Hospitality Social Media Marketing News – August 15, 2018 Issue

Image source: Facebook

What This Means for Hotels

Many hotels and resorts use video ads on Facebook and Instagram to connect with their audience, build brand awareness, and increase reservation bookings. Be on the lookout for these changes. The new video play metric will be particularly helpful, because when compared against impressions, you’ll be able to gauge initial interest. If necessary, this can help you make changes to your video campaigns to get more interest early on, getting more results.

Facebook Releases New Mobile Ad Creation Tools

Facebook’s Ads Manager app now has a whole suite of new creative toolsthat allow you to create more dynamic ad campaigns right on your mobile device.

New features include abilities to:

• Add logos or text overlay to your ad images
• Check to make sure there’s no more than 20% text on your ads
• Crop images
• Add stickers
• Apply color filters
• Use ad templates to improve appearance

Image source: Facebook

What This Means for Hotels

The ability for hotels and resorts to better create more visually appealing ads on the go is always an advantage. We no longer need to rely on third-party apps or designers to add text overlay, logos, or adjust the color on our ad images, saving us a few steps along the way.

Facebook Restricts Cross-Posts from Twitter

As of August 1st, Facebook restricted posting access to the platform. Tweets and Retweets are no longer automatically cross-posted on Facebook, even if you had that feature enabled. This is due to the new API restrictions Facebook has been putting in place.

Image source: TechCrunch

What This Means for Hotels

Best practices have already dictated not to cross-post tweets to your hotel’s professional pages on Facebook, so not many hotels and resorts will see a lot of change here. That being said, if you use any kind of software to automatically post your Tweets to your Page, shut it down immediately.

Facebook Updates Workplace

Facebook has been aggressively updating their Workplace over the past few months, and they just rolled out a few more features. The new additions focus on improving team collaboration and improving personalization capabilities to boost relationship building. They include:

• One-click connection to facilitate chat
• Highlight team members’ birthdays
• Directory search, which makes it easier to find team members
• Workplace profiles to share personal information
• Admin control over what’s shared in Workplace profiles

Image source: Facebook

Facebook’s Workplace has also required an email startup, messaging, and calendar app called Redkix, and there are rumorsthat this will be used to improve communication abilities in Workplace further.

What This Means for Hotels

Facebook’s Workplace seems to be positioning itself to attempt to replace Slack, and larger hotels and resorts with larger teams (either internal or external) typically need software like this for communication, project management, and distribution of important messages. If you’re in need of software like this for your hotel, keep an eye on Workplace and all the new features– it may be the right fit for you.

WhatsApp Releases Business API

WhatsApp’s launch of the Business APIis an expansion of their business tools, and it allows larger businesses to send non-promotional messages to customers like reservation reminders or shipping information. You can do this for a fixed rate. The new API is currently only available for 90 specific companies, but it will be rolled out on a more widespread basis soon.

What This Means for Hotels

The ability for hotels and resorts to be able to send reservation reminders or arrival instructions is another great way to engage guests before they even set foot on your property. This is also a great way to jumpstart conversations; guests can respond with any questions they have, and you can address them right away, providing top-notch customer service.

Instagram Tests Emoji Reactions to Stories

Thanks to marketing sleuth Matt Navarra, we know that Instagram is testing new Facebook-style emoji response options for Instagram Stories. The Facebook counterpart just rolled out last month, so there’s a good chance we’ll see this soon.