This is the third article in a series on Facebook's Graph Search. You can find the first part here and the second part here.
Facebook’s new Graph Search feature is still in beta, but to help hoteliers get a jump on the competition, Hotel Management rounded up some top tips on how hotels can maximize their visibility.
Hotels should start by making sure they have an accurate, up-to-date Facebook page, said Tim Peter, president of Tim Peter & Associates. “I’d recommend people look towards booking tools or at least a link to booking within that page—a call to action that drives customers deeper into the purchase bubble and encourages likes from them.”
“I would plan almost as if your Facebook page were a micro-website,” said Toby Bloomberg, director of social media integration for Cox Media Group. “Think about search engine optimization on your posts, your graphics, and think about the back end, how you position yourself with information.”
Having eye-catching graphics will be vital, Bloomberg said, because Graph Search will be a primarily visual search engine. “Instead of pulling in text for the most part, it pulls in photos, and you can click on the photo and go back to your friend’s page,” she said. “If I see a property that should be five star but the photos aren’t up to a five-star value, there’s a disconnect.”
Peter recommends hotels encourage guests to take eye-catching photos of their property and share them.
“Among the most popular searches are photos of ‘x,’ photos of my friends, photos liked by me, photos liked by my friends,” he said.
Bloomberg notes that properties can keep a photo album on their site that is easily usable for sharing. “That photography might be a little crisper than what guests would take,” she said.
As is becoming increasingly common, the way a hotel serves its guests will also end up reflected in that hotel’s social media profile. “Make sure that you’re participating in the conversation and serving your customers well within the social web,” Bloomberg said. “That might mean that you take a different look at using the social web for customer care and how you respond and that the property itself always look its best—you never know who’s going to take a picture and post it, and that will be something that comes up in the search.”
This post originally appeared on www.hotelmanagement.net