How to Sell Hotel Rooms with Social Media S1E5

Foreign. Welcome back to the Boost Hospitality podcast. My name is Mark Simpson, I'm your host and I'm the founder of boostly, short for Boost Hospitality, the only podcast out there that gives you easy, actionable tips on how to increase your direct bookings and get some more heads on beds. So let's start off today we're going to be going over social media and how you can sell using social and how to break the myth that you cannot do anything on social media. You can't book rooms on social media. So first of all, I've got a stat. 72% of all small businesses will be using social media by the end of 2017. Now try and guess what the amount is. The number is right now 18%. That is the amount of small businesses which are using social media right now in 2016. So in a year's time that is going to go up to 72%, which is phenomenal. There is a massive shift towards social media and if your hotel, your guest house, your holiday cottage, your apartment, your rental isn't on board with social media, you are going to be missing out on bookings. So what I want to do in this podcast is show and share some tips from what I've done in my time that has helped grow a very small farm stay property with 200 Facebook fans to being the number one, the most followed in the whole of Scarborough within a couple of years. So the first thing that you can do is get your guests that are currently staying with you to interact with you on social media. So if you are listening to this and you at present, when you check a guest in, give them a welcome letter or you have some in the room just to say about breakfast or check in times or checkout times. That is the perfect place to put information about your social media channels. So for example, what we did at this, at the granary, the small farm stay that I used to run, in every room, we would have a welcome letter. So when a guest checked in, on their bed would be a welcome letter and on there at the very top, it would be a little message saying follow us on Facebook and we give them the link. So www.comsorry.facebook.com forward/granary. We would then encourage everybody to follow us on Facebook and as always, nobody does anything without a reward. So we said that if you checked in on Facebook, you'd get a free drink from our bar and we put a little TNC at the bottom, which meant non alcoholic drinks only. So we've got a fridge drinks fridge which is like lots of cool little local drinks and Cokes and everything you can imagine. So if someone checked in on Facebook, they'll be rewarded with a Coke. Now that Coke probably cost us a couple of pounds, one pound, you know, but that Facebook check in that Facebook like was worth a hundred, two hundred, three hundred pounds. Return on investment was phenomenal because if you think about it, Mrs. Smith of Birmingham comes and stays with us. She checks in and likes our Facebook page, checks in on Facebook and says, I'm having an amazing time, takes a picture of our farm, posts it on their wall, that then goes off to her friends, 300, 400, 500, 600 friends that she has in the Birmingham area on their wall, on the timeline in their eyeline and it says, James, Mrs. Smith checked in at the granary. This is a picture. It's, it's, it's basically saying that it's, it's word of mouth recommendation. It's a referral and it's a referral which is going on Facebook feed, which is then being seen by all of their friends. If I was to do the exact same post, it wouldn't have the same effect because it would look like I am selling something. So they wouldn't, their eyeline would just be dismiss what I'm saying basically because I'm doing it as a business, but because it's their friend who is doing has such a different effect. So that is why I really encourage you now to add your social media information into your guest rooms at the welcome letter. The point of people arriving, when people arrive at your property, it's when they're at their happiest. They're ready, they're excited, the adrenaline is going, they want us, they're getting ready for their holiday. The best time to ask them to do something is at that point. Secondly, there may be some of you listening to this podcast who don't have a social media profile yet. If that is the case, stop this podcast right now, create a Facebook page and then come right back here if you want any help or advice. If you go to boostlead.co.uk I've got some how to's on how to set up your Facebook profile, your Twitter profile and Instagram, which are the top three. If you want to go on YouTube, Periscope, which is another really cool app. There's Snapchat, there's loads. If you do a simple Google search, there's lots of help and advice on how to get started. When you set up your social media profile and you want to promote and push content. Content is anything from pictures to descriptions to latest news to events, etc. It's easy to get fallen into the trap of having your Facebook page look like a advertising slot. It's very important that you don't get into that. And what you do is you mix it up between social and selling. If you think about it, people don't come onto Facebook to be sold. They come on to check in what their friends are doing, to see some funny pictures, some memes or videos. They don't come on to be sold. So it's very important that when you are thinking of what to write or what to post on your Facebook page is that you don't turn it into an advertising magazine. A good ratio that I like to work on is the 8020 rule. So 80% is social, 20% is selling. So for example, if you do 10 posts in a week, eight of those are social. And a social post could be anything from a picture of your local town. It could be if you live somewhere unique. For example, I used to run a farmstay guest house. I was very lucky that we've got lots of animals which people love. So highland cattle, dogs, donkeys, sheep, lambs. I was able to take pictures of them and post them. If you're not as fortunate and you say that you live by the coast but you've got pictures of the sea, take pictures of that. You know, find social content that you can promote and push and ask lots of questions. So if you wanted to take a picture of Scarborough beach, you could put Scarborough beach, who's been here recently. So make it interactive, make it social. The more times that someone will click like and comment on your Facebook posts, the more the more times your post will show on their newsfeed. If you want to go in a bit more in depth on this conversation about the Facebook algorithm and how Facebook business posts are getting hidden and pushed down even more, then you can google and find lots of really interesting videos and stats about how a Facebook business post has been seen by fewer and fewer people. But a great way to combat that is, is to get your people who like your page liking and commenting and sharing on your posts. So a great way to do that is to keep it social. Now the 20% of selling it can be something from book now for 2017 rates, booking and selling a room promoting by adding information about a new room that you've done and some special offers that are coming up or some events that are coming up that what you could do for the selling and then for Social media, keep it purely interactive. Always think when you're posting your next Facebook post, just say does this fall in the social side or does this sell the or does this go in the social side? Or does this fall in the selling side? So really big one that finally how the quickest way of getting more people to like and share your Facebook page and comments and content that you put out. There's two ways. One is you can invest in Facebook ads and Facebook ads as a whole. Other podcast, it's not one that I would be best informed to tell you about. There's so many great podcasts out there about Facebook advertising. If you just Google it then you can find out loads of information. But that is a great way of spreading the word of what you do. Or if you don't want to go and invest lots of money into it and you want to do something a lot simpler. Competitions, it's the easiest, quickest, best way of getting people to interact with your Facebook page. For example, for the granary, we did a competition to win a bit of Scarborock. It's cheap, it was simple, it was fun, but it was so effective. Normal Facebook post would probably be seen by say a thousand people. This was seen by 10, 20,000 people. We got 10 new likes from it and we had so much interaction and those likes then converted into bookings because people were seeing us for the first time. They maybe didn't know about us. They didn't know that you could come and stay at the property. As well as being a farm stay property, it's also a tea rooms, a restaurant, a venture events. So by spending what a stick of rock is less than a pound. It's very unique to Scarborough. It's one of our signature things. But by doing that it opened our visibility to so many new people. So competitions is the easiest way, of course for anybody in the hotel industry. Very, very, very easy. You could just give away a room for the night, but then that is a cost, you know, it's a big cost, you know, talking about 30, 40, 50 pound cost, cleaning, electricity, blocking the room out, etc. So you can do some at small, you can do some at big. If you want to see some examples, if you go to the granary Facebook page, it's www.facebook.com granary G R A I N A R Y And you can see some examples of what we have been doing over the last three years. Be social, okay with your brand. If you put a face to the brand, you, you just get more interaction. Any property out There doesn't matter if it's a hotel, a guest house, if you put your name and your face to your property, you will have more interaction. It's just fact. So what I want you to do at every podcast I want you to do and take some away from this. This one is going to be about social media and about Facebook. So what I want you to do is go and stand in front of your property and take a selfie, post it on your Facebook or your Twitter or your Instagram and just write something saying, lovely day here at X. Hope you're having a great day. Tell us what you're doing. Question mark so make it interactive, keep it social and I would love to see the responses. Email markoostly.co.uk M A-R K B O-O-S-T-L-Y.co.uk or get in contact on Twitter ostleyuk or, or just let me know how it goes on comment on Facebook. Just get in touch with me. I would love to see the responses and then we can go from there. As always, thank you very much for listening to the Boost Hospitality podcast. I hope you've taken something from this episode. I'd love to hear your feedback. Email markoostly.co.uk or contact us on Twitter oostleyuk. If you could please do me a massive favor and review this in itunes, that'd be fantastic. Give it a little gold star. Five gold stars would also be lovely as well. And tell people about this. This is how we're going to spread the word. My mission is to help every independent guest house, hotel, Property in the UK improve their diary bookings, to not rely on OTAs and to get more heads on beds. Thank you.