Your team needs a social media style guide in order to produce on-brand posts quickly. Additionally, this document assists new hires quickly as they join your social media department.
Ideal, your style guide should address how to engage followers, respond to customer feedback and achieve overall best practices from both a language and visual standpoint.
Identify Your Audience
An effective approach to developing a social media style guide for hotels is identifying their audience. Doing this will allow you to determine what types of posts will resonate most with them and help create a content strategy that aligns with your goals.
Start by understanding your hotel’s identity and value proposition, which will enable you to create a brand voice and tone consistent with its overall look and feel. This will enable your brand to shine through in all the content produced for social media posts, email newsletters or marketing ads you produce – helping determine the ideal type of visual imagery to use across each platform.
Your social media style guide should encompass more than aesthetic requirements. It should also outline any spelling, grammar or punctuation rules you want to abide by (for instance limiting use of emojis or using passive voice or informal language in content creation). In addition to that, providing guidelines on how to format content across platforms – for instance each platform has unique image size requirements and formatting restrictions – would also be beneficial.
Crafting engaging social media content is no simple task, but your team can make it simpler by identifying what works. This can be accomplished by tracking post performance and determining what kind of posts resonate best with your followers. Once you know more about what kind of content engages people and converts guests, creating a style guide may prove more successful in driving engagement and increasing guest conversion rates.
Visuals are key on social media, so having high-quality photos and videos that showcase your hotel amenities and experiences are a must. Influencer marketing can also help reach a broader audience; Soneva Jani in the Maldives collaborated with popular Youtubers Kara & Nate to produce a video featuring their overwater villa that has received over 8 million views on Instagram alone! Another way to boost engagement and credibility by encouraging guest-generated content (UGC) creation: promote a branded hashtag and ask guests to post photos and experiences at your hotel by encouraging guests sharing photos and experiences through UGC platforms; then reposting the best pieces back onto your channels.
Determine Your Content Strategy
Content creation can help hotels draw in more website traffic, build brand recognition and earn user trust while eventually turning leads into guests. But crafting effective content requires an exhaustive plan with clear guidelines and effective execution.
Luxury hotel brands stand apart in the hospitality industry because of their specific challenges in communicating their value proposition through visual and written content that appeals to high-end customers. This requires developing buyer personas for customers as a starting point for creating content strategy plans and implementation plans.
Content should align with the platforms you are using in order to reach and engage your target audience effectively. Therefore, it is vital that you identify where your audience spends their time, as well as which types of posts work best on each platform – for instance publishing more in-depth articles on your website while posting images and video content via social media accounts may work better.
Once you know which types of content to produce, the next step should be establishing a content calendar and setting posting frequency. This will help keep you on track and ensure timely delivery of your posts. Hootsuite or SocialPilot software tools make this easier by providing month-view calendars and scheduling posts ahead of time.
An essential aspect of any content strategy should be to highlight local destinations. A great way to do this is by creating a list of “Top Things to Do” with eye-catching photos and helpful information – an effective way to promote them while drawing new visitors in.
Social media should also be used to advertise any events happening at your hotel, from guest activities and events, as well as any local entertainment being sponsored. For instance, The Little Nell in Aspen used Instagram posts promoting their Ride + Dine event series which attracted both guests and locals.
Create a Style Guide
Branding involves creating an image for your hotel that is consistent, including how it appears online and social media. While maintaining consistency may seem challenging when multiple people work on its content creation, having a style guide in place will provide guidance. A style guide essentially serves as a set of rules which outline what marketing materials can and cannot do when developing brand material for use by your hotel.
When developing a style guide, there are a number of elements you must keep in mind, such as color, typography and imagery. Each of these can make or break a marketing campaign so it’s crucial to carefully select them. Color can have an immediate effect on our mood – blue often suggests serenity while red conveys excitement and energy. Furthermore, shade may impact its meaning further; deep red could indicate power while light pink could suggest femininity.
Typography should also play an integral part of creating your hotel’s style guidelines. The type of font you choose for your hotel says much about itself; different font types connote particular images and emotions within an audience, for instance technology companies often prefer sans-serif fonts while accounting and management companies may opt for traditional serif fonts. Selecting an original font style will help your audience relate better with it and connect more fully.
Your style guide should also address imagery usage. Social media posts featuring imagery can make or break an overall impression about your hotel, so investing in professional photos that showcase its best features is vital in increasing brand credibility and encouraging tourists to book stays at your establishment.
After creating a style guide, it’s crucial that all members of your team understand it. While freelancers may adapt more readily to following strict rules than in-house contributors may; by engaging your team early on with its creation and refinement, any issues can be easily resolved.
Train Your Team
Social media provides an effective means of connecting with past, present, and prospective guests of your hotel, showcasing its distinctive features, promoting specials/events/awareness-raising, as well as increasing brand recognition. However, successful hotel social media marketing requires more planning than initially apparent – for optimal content production in this arena it requires having a detailed strategy, clear guidelines and consistent messaging strategies in place.
An effective social media style guide is your weapon for reaching all of this. A style guide serves as a clear framework for efficiently producing on-brand and consistent content that increases engagement while building trust with your target audience.
Implementing a social media style guide when working with a team is crucial in creating a consistent experience across your brand’s identity and voice. Just like having a choir sing in harmony, having the proper sheet music in place ensures everyone works towards achieving a similar result.
Are You Wanting to Maximize Social Media for Your Hotel? Ideally, begin by setting up a Facebook Page as this provides the ideal way to establish brand presence, provide updates and post visually appealing material.
As your hotel’s first step, create a profile name and biog that reflect its branding. Also be sure to include contact details as well as a link back to its website.
Next, choose a background image and cover photo that highlights your property’s distinctive features and location. Be sure to upload high-resolution photographs that clearly demonstrate what sets you apart, as well as adding a tagline that summarizes its value proposition.
Instagram provides hotels with an ideal platform for sharing images of their rooms, lobbies, restaurants and local attractions. Posting regular, high-quality pictures will attract a following while raising engagement levels – including relevant hashtags will help increase visibility and reach. Hotel brands may also leverage user-generated content by encouraging guests to post their own experiences at the hotel which will then be reshared by them on their feeds. Finally, consider partnering with influencers or travel bloggers such as Kara & Nate of YouTube fame in order to gain exposure – for instance Soneva Jani in Maldives collaborated with influencers from Youtuber Kara & Nate which helped showcase overwater villas and reach 8 Million views on video!