Hotels turn to Instagram, Pinterest
- Starwood%2C Four Seasons are among chains using newer social media
- Marriott is offering prizes to travelers who post content on the hotel chain using hashtag
- It%27s difficult to tell whether the campaigns will translate into more loyal and frequent customers
Move over Facebook and Twitter.
Hotels are expanding their social media presence by increasingly turning to such visual platforms as Instagram and Pinterest.
Starwood Hotels and Resorts today will begin integrating content from photo-sharing site Instagram on all of its websites for its more than 1,500 properties worldwide. Instagram photos and videos geo-tagged by guests will appear in new Guest Galleries on websites for all nine Starwood brands. The idea, Starwood says, is to help travelers visualize and plan their next trip.
This follows the Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts last month incorporating Pinterest's new Place Pins feature into its Pin.Pack.Go program. Pinterest lets users create a virtual board with photos to plan parties, vacations or simply show off their interests.
Since August, the Four Seasons has been letting guests create boards for their next vacation then leave a comment on the Four Seasons' Pin.Pack.Go board alerting them to the property they'd like to visit. An online concierge then engages with the guest and, if invited to, posts recommendations on the guest's board. With place pins, the recommendations will now include maps and contact information for easier vacation planning.
The chains are trying to capitalize on the growing popularity of Instagram, Pinterest and other sites that let travelers share their experiences through photos.
In a phone survey of 1,005 adults ages 18 and older last year, Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project found that 12% were using Instagram and 12% were using Pinterest. Twitter was not that much more popular, with 16% of adults engaging with it.
"For the past two years, Pinterest and Instagram have grown rapidly but Facebook and Twitter took a while to build momentum," says Debbie Miller, founder of Social Hospitality, an Orange County, Calif., marketing firm that focuses on social media. "Travel specifically is such a visual thing. It's such a visual medium, so these platforms are perfect for it."
Major hotel chains have realized that. As part of Marriott's new Travel Brilliantly campaign targeting young Millennial travelers, the company gave out prizes, such as travel technology products, to people who posted content on Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter using the #travelbrilliantly hashtag.
Earlier this summer, InterContinental Hotels Group invited guests to post pictures of their hotel stays on Instagram with the hashtag #DiscoverIHG for the chance to win 100,000 to 1 million IHG Rewards Club points.
"For us, it's not replacing the efforts we have on Facebook and Twitter. They're still relevant to our travelers," says Felicia Yukich, manager of global social media marketing for the Four Seasons. "But it would be foolish to ignore the fact that travelers are turning more and more to these visual platforms."
Still, it's difficult to tell if all these campaigns translate into more loyal and frequent customers.
"There's still a lot of ambiguity in that regard. We can't track it 100%," Miller says. "It's more return on engagement than return on investment, necessarily."
Chris Holdren, senior vice president of Starwood Preferred Guest and Digital, says guests have already shown that they want to engage by sharing photos. Starwood hotels are tagged in more than 40,000 Instagrams a month.
Starwood has also been allowing guests to post unedited reviews of properties on its websites. The Instagram project, says Holdren, is an extension of that because travelers will now be able to visualize a guest's experience as well as read about it.
"Travel is inherently just by its nature social," he says. "When guests can see the exact experience other guests like them had at one of our hotels and resorts, we're confident that that will lead to increased engagement."