Recent research by Marketing magazine has shown that the fashion retailers are the best at social media marketing, if you look at the number of followers they have. Burberry are top with 1 million Facebook fans, 22,140 Twitter followers and 1682 YouTube subscribers. Top-shop has over 500,000 Facebook fans and Asos just over 250,000. Fans and followers don’t necessarily convert to purchasers, but recent research by Verdict shows that 50% of consumers read customer reviews when shopping online.
I quickly checked a few major hotel chains and found that Hilton have 47,000 Facebook fans, Best Western just over 20,000, Holiday Inn a measly 1,300, Premier Inn 1600 & Malmaison 1 person!!!! This suggests that hotel companies don’t have professional social media strategies. The hotel industry has never been at the cutting edge of marketing, but surely they have had plenty of time to wake up to the reality of social media and the relationship you can then have with your customers?
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1 response so far ↓
1 hospitalitymarketinggroup // Nov 21, 2010 at 12:03 am
Hotels need to get active on Social media sites. These are the places that customers are going to talk about our businesses. Hotels seem to continue to be slow to act on important marketing mediums.
I wrote a blog post called Hotel Online Reputation Management and the Music Business.
Basically its talking about the similarities the hotel industry is having to the music business when it comes to resisting change.
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