Switzerland, Suisse, die Schweiz, Svizzera – Multilingual, friendly, amazing scenery and a long interesting history!
Swiss Flag
Switzerland is a beautiful country and I find it similar to Canada in the sense of the natural tourism it has. My mother was there for about 2 weeks and stayed at a hotel. So what do I do?! After looking at their website, I take a look at their social media:
All the websites that I have seen are top-notch. I mean, they look clean, well-done, have pictures and sometimes contain a news page. Their social media on the other hand, not so good. It displays the hotel as something that was started, but not finished. Is that hotel still around?
Yes it is and here are some tips to make that known:
Twitter Tips
Tweet: Yes, simple as that. Tweet. Why does someone create a profile and never tweet. Your first tweet could be a simple introduction. A simple hello will do.
Tweet after 2010: This is for those hotels that took that extra bit of effort. Their last tweet was in 2010. I wish it was 2010. I would still be in my studies and the only worry would have been passing your exams.
Don’t just retweet: One hotel’s Twitter page had retweets only. Retweets from the same guy, so at least they were consistent… I guess. The pictures he has are nonetheless beautiful, but the links are so outdated that they don’t even link to anything anymore.
Engage: Wow that’s a hard one, yes engage. What’s the point of being on social media if you only talk to yourself! Have a conversation or two with someone that is loyal to your hotel. Follow them and see what they are doing, maybe they might be in your city again and you should be the first one to say hello to them.
Twitter is completely under-utilised by the hotel industry. These hotels believe that there is nothing to do with Twitter in terms of their hotel. Wrong! Just because you don’t know what to do, doesn’t mean that there isn’t anything to do.
Swiss Hotels are the cool kids in the class
Some hotels, I view them as the cool kid in the class. They don’t need social media, why would they, they are the (insert famous hotel name here). What they don’t understand is that it’s actually like someone hosting a huge dinner party and not caring to send out invitations. I mean you are so cool, why do you need to send out invitations or your address, people will simply come. Right? Wrong again!
My opinion
If you are a 5 Star hotel especially if you charge more than $800 CAD per room per night, you need to have social media. If you are anything else, you still need to have social media, it is just less shocking because some smaller hotels really can’t afford the time, money or anything else. Can they afford not having it? Can a start-up business afford to not have a website?
Facebook looking better
Taking a look at their Facebook pages, they are doing much better than Twitter. You can see that there have been posts more recent than 2010. What looks horrible is that there is no interaction. It looks like a regular plain old ad that nobody reads. Yes, some people liked your page, but that is not enough. Does that person remember your like out of the 100s of likes on their Facebook account?
Facebook Tips
Create engaging content: Yes, work actually has to be done. Who said social media would be quick and easy?! Relationships are never quick and easy, not even in the quick online world. They may be quicker, but not easy, if not even harder because you can only keep one’s attention for so long.
Don’t just promote: Social media is not a cold call, quite the opposite. You want to know who is following you as much as they want to know about you. You may put up offers, but this isn’t the place to make cold calls.
Give it some personality: Behind your Facebook account there is a person and I’m not talking about your social media manager. What personality radiates from your social media?
Other Social Media Platforms
There isn’t just Facebook or even Twitter. For this you need to take a look at the latest trends in social media. Make sure you stay up-to-date just like you would with the news. Then follow these steps:
- Research your clientele
- Where are they (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.)?
- Be ready to open an account on a new social media platform
- Be ready to learn how to use it
- Be ready to engage in a different way (ie. Don’t just copy content from other social media platforms)
Hiring a social media professional
Who are you hiring here? Is it a “social media intern”? Hopefully companies will start realizing that an intern is there to learn and not to do your social media work, unless you have a social media professional there to teach them, so please don’t try to save money hiring an intern, that is not how it works. This is your pride and joy and you put its reputation in someone’s hands, you make sure that person knows what they are doing. What I found funny is that a hotel is geared towards foreign clients and all their Twitter posts are in German. Did I miss something? Keywords are the important here! Comfy, affordable or any other words used to describe a place aren’t the same in every language.
Social Media Awards
And the award for Best Social Media goes to….. Hotel Bristol in Geneva! Congratulations!
Hotel Bristol Facebook
You do it so well that next time I’m in Geneva, I am staying with you! Honestly, you display personality and if Hotel Bristol was a person, they would be friendly, helpful, pleasant to chat with, cheery and funny! I love the fact that it is multilingual and even when you found someone check in on Foursquare, commented in Russian, you still made an effort to understand what was said (or you speak Russian) and to retweet it. Nonetheless the Люблю (Russian for “I love”) shows how they feel about your hotel! Many hotels could learn from you. Keep up the great work!
Hotel Bristol Twitter Humor
Know what you are doing
Please, please Swiss hotels, prove me wrong! Fix up your social media, you can “posten auf Deutsch” or “si tu tweete”, it is important that you do it right. Social media, Soziale Medien or médias sociaux is important for everyone. Learn it, whether you love it or hate it, it is here to stay and now is the time!
Need to know what to do from the beginning: Social Media and Hospitality - Social Media im Gastgewerbe
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Socially Lost in Media – Social Media Marketing and Management
Hi Dino,
Your article is very interesting, which drove me to have a look at your Award winning facebook page.
I must say I was surprised to see they did not have any activities during the past 3 months (between May and July).
My understanding of Social Media is that it is about engagement and communication. In my mind, hotel Le Richemond or the Kempinksi are very more socially engaged. Don’t you think so ?
Greg
Hello Greg,
I am very happy that you read the article and commented. It is great to learn from others as social media marketing is new to many.
In regards to hotels, I looked at hotels with a maximum of 100 spaces (rooms, suites, etc.). The Grand Hotel Kempinski Geneva is an immaculate hotel with 412 rooms and 33 suites. Absolutely lovely, but unfortunately I wasn’t looking at their social media yet. Judging hotels of that calibre and comparing them to each other would take more than 20 hours of full research online.
Here is the reason why I thought the Bristol Hotel Geneva was good at social media:
Most hotels I saw had little or no social media/social media activity (hotels up to 100 rooms)
Now even a hotel like Kempinski in Geneva has a Facebook page and when you search up Grand Hotel Kempinski Geneva on Facebook you come to their first effort at creating a Facebook page. Looking at their second one https://www.facebook.com/KempinskiGeneva
It really does look good, but they also have inactivity from August 23, 2011 to April 10, 2012.
Kempinski does have a general Worldwide Facebook page for all their hotels, which I haven’t really checked out, but that is extremely difficult to compare with the Bristol Hotel’s social media in Geneva. One mistake that Hotel Bristol Geneva made, which is important to point out, is that I believe they created a personal Facebook account, which is the wrong way to go. Their almost 1000 friends and non-visibility could be better transferred to their public page.
From what I know, the Grand Hotel Kempinski Geneva doesn’t have a Twitter page, but they do have a worldwide Twitter page. The website off the Grand Hotel Kempinski in Geneva has a Twitter widget that takes you to https://twitter.com/#!/Kempinski
Kempinski general Worldwide Hotel Twitter page has tweeted 639 times whereas the Bristol in Geneva 8,167. Now, Kempinski does have a few other twitter accounts some inactive some active. Still, it is hard to compare the two as Hotel Bristol probably has a marketing director that does the social media part-time and Kempinski, well a hotel of their calibre, they must have hired a social media manager for their Worldwide Social Media pages. Hotel Bristol Geneva is specifically present with their social media in Geneva and I feel that is nice, even though social media is online, it is nice to be a social media manager/online community manager focusing on a community. As global as social media is, there are things that should still be kept local as H&M France, H&M Germany and H&M UK could be but shouldn’t be the same account online. Social media should still be localized to the point where it matters to customers/clients and where the business can dedicate its resources to that.
Hotel Bristol Geneva is multilingual, present, currently and I hope will continue to be active as of July, as well as receives comments and likes on their statuses, they are friendly, have retweets and tweet to others. It is far from perfect, but a step in the right direction. They can make many improvements, but what is important for them to look at now, is what social media platform to dedicate their time to, whether that is Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, etc. This is very important in social media as you go where your clients are and what your goals are.
From some of the other hotels (100 rooms and less) in Switzerland that I saw, I was quite surprised at their social media and the Bristol Hotel isn’t perfect that is for sure, but as long as they continue posting on their Facebook page, I think they will be O.K.
Stay tuned to when we take a look at some of the bigger hotels. Your comments are as always, very appreciated. Thank you!
nun, bevor über Social Media in der Schweizer Hotellerie berichtet wird, würd ich als Blogger erst mal lernen, wie die Schweizer Fahne aussieht….
Meine Social-Media-Fähigkeiten sind stärker als meine Photoshop-Kenntnisse, da bin ich sicher. Ich danke Ihnen für den Hinweis.