The smartest hoteliers, hospitality professionals, and business people in the world won’t ignore this post. Why should you? Reshare so those people listening and ahead of the game will have the leg up.
Most of us know this…. but here is why Google Plus is the future, and Facebook is laughably irrelevant. On Plus, most will think this is old news, but a lot of hotel people are slow to get it:
I furthered my revelations about Google vs Facebook today. G+ isn’t social, it is the organic search of the future, and those of us on Plus are *so* far ahead of anyone. It’s exciting.
I was about to post some hotel breakfast photos on Facebook, so I could link to them in a management response on Yelp . But that’s silly…. FB is a closed & walled network. No one visits biz pages on their Facebook account. Or at least, it’s passive. Let me know if you hang out all day on Facebook biz pages and I will eat crow. Those photos would be positively lost on that site. So I posted them to Google Plus. So now, any time people search terms like national park, historic, breakfast, inn, continental, etc – all of it enters into organic search. That means that someone searching relevant search terms will find our hotel, without needing to know it exists, or without having to know the name. That is INSANE.
That means that G+ is also the new microblogging platform for hotels…. I don’t need Tumblr, I don’t need FB, etc. Social, to me, is a waste of time as “storytelling”, because social is so much about “me me me”, no one gives a damn about your hotel until they need something from you. That’s where G+ comes in – the more keywords in posts, the more relevant you become in organic search. By posting on FB you are basically wasting time talking to people that already know you, who are not currently in the booking process. They need to opt-in, know your name, etc. They probably already stayed and aren’t planning to come back.
Posting on Google Plus actually inserts your hotel into the booking process via relevancy in keywords – topography, geography, etc community, etc. They don’t need to know your brand name, they just need to want to book the hotel that you are – national park, historic, green, wine country, luxury, resort, etc. Social, to me, should be about uniting people with your business that don’t already know it exists…. therefore generating revenue while making people extremely happy…. that’s what G+ does.
People may not know our Allison Inn & Spa, but the more you post on the G+ page, “Wine country”, “Willamette Valley” etc as search terms mean we will show up before any wine country hotel in the world, etc. Exciting. Hence the ramble a bit. Pardon.
But think about it. Operations should take back social, and smack any marketing people that talk about Facebook.
I would say your welcome, but for all the eyes not hitting this… you have been warned. The future is Google Plus, because the future is still search, and your future revenues depend on it.
=)