Hotel Blogs - When Hotel Marketing gets Social: When Hotels Chains use Twitter (part 2)

Monday, June 15, 2009

When Hotels Chains use Twitter (part 2)

For the study conducted, I selected only 15 hotel brands Twitter users but I could have picked some more. Sorry if I didn't select yours, it wasn't deliberate from me. I will follow up with another analysis about how independent hotels use Twitter. So let's have a look at 5 other hotel chains.
Read Part 1 of this study here.

Choice Hotels is very much focused on brands exposures and you can clearly see this on their Twitter homepage with all logos listed. Again, this is another example of how one way marketing works (or doesn't work) meaning Choice Hotels use Twitter to only push information online. They don't seem really interested to follow any body (note 0 following on their page). Twitter is used for Direct Marketing. Also you can see they are still in early stage (only 8 updates).

Hyatt does things differently. First of all, their Twitter account is HyattConcierge, so this activity has a purpose on its own rather than being the "Corporate" Twitter page. As you scroll down all the activity going on, you notice they do manage very well the direct messages "DM" with their community. All updates are directly targeted at individual Twitter users. It's a shame we can't follow through what's happening after the DM to the customer, but this looks to me very innovative about how you approach customer service before, during and after your stay. In terms of stats, they have more than 2,000 followers and follow about 1,800 users.

Again, another example of great interaction between the hotel chain and the Twitter users crowd. By using TweetDeck (a Twitter 3rd party application), Joie De Vivre manages more effectively what people are saying about their brand or their hotel property. Also they use the tool to promote their offers from different participating hotels like the $84 rate at the Citizen hotel. They have nearly managed to get 2,000 followers and follow even more Twitter accounts.

The representation company Luxe hotels has always been synonym of trendy, modern, design and boutique hotels. Unfortunately, their Twitter page lacks of imagination and doesn't even respond to brand awareness (you can't read properly their brand name on the left side). However, they have some interaction with other Twitter users and also push some interesting facts and promos on their updates. Again another decent figure of 1,368 followers. They also follow more people.

I was looking forward to see how Marriott was approaching Twitter because of the huge success of their blogging activity with On the Move blog by Bill Marriott. Like Starwood did, they have 2 persons John and Blake who manages Twitter and engage with the audience. Impressively, they have over 9,000 followers and follow 7,600 Twitter accounts. They also sent over 1,900 updates (in one week after this screen shot, they passed the 2,000 mark) on their account!!! With the usage of Twitterfeed, Twhirl, TweetDesk, you can see they have "professionals" managing their Twitter account. Also you can see their updates are not all about promos and responding to customers (example:@GeeEmm The top choice for famous person tweeps most wanted to travel with was....Anthony Bourdain. President Obama was near the top too.)

Posted at 06:30 PM in Analysis, Hotel Chains, Travel 2.0 | Permalink