The Revinate Blog

How to Measure Your Twitter Performance

Last year, we shared some best practices around  on how to most effectively manage and optimize your hotel's presence on Twitter. This article covers the importance of using hashtags in your tweets, keeping your messages to a re-tweetable length and scheduling posts in advance, among other tips. As we will discuss in our upcoming webinar, measuring your social media marketing performance through results-based analysis is the next imperative next step. Here are a few key performance indicators (KPIs) to use as part of your Twitter performance evaluation: 

1. Clicks: Since you only have 140 characters to work with on Twitter, using a URL shortener is essential, especially given the fact that posts between 100-120 characters are far more likely to be re-tweeted (RT). Fortunately, nearly every URL shortener - whether you are working from our Twitter Client or a third-party social dashboard - gives you the opportunity to track the number of clicks each tweet receives. This KPI is useful as reviewing which tweets are most popular will help inform your content strategy moving forward.
2. Re-tweets: Similarly, measuring the number of re-tweets your posts receive is a great metric to evaluate your messages' reach and will help you refine your posting strategy on-the-go forward. Paying attention to the times your tweets are most re-tweeted will help you determine when to schedule your messages. 
3. Mentions: The amount of mentions (@) your handle receives is another engagement KPI that reports on your messages' reach and relevance. Have in mind that the number of re-tweets your messages receive may overlap with the number of mentions you acquire, as users that edit a tweet before re-tweeting will fall into this category. Revinate clients can easily track the number of mentions their properties receive from our Twitter Client. 
4. Referral traffic: Traffic that your website or blog receives via tweets should be measured as part of your KPI evaluation. Google Analytics not only allows users to see how much social media traffic your website receives by segment, but also gives users the chance to learn more about these visitors and see how they behave on your site. 

Keeping close track of these KPIs is a jumping off point when starting to evaluate your performance in the space. Remember, however, that the main objective of your Twitter strategy show focus on creating and sharing engaging content, not merely just acquiring more brand mentions and re-tweets. If your content is interesting, these KPI improvements will follow. 

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How a Hotel & Resort Leverages Social Media for the Holidays

During the holiday season, there is a host of hotels, resorts and restaurants running holiday programs and promotions for their guests. While many of these properties have chosen to stick to offering holiday packages bookable through the traditional online channels (e.g. OTAs and direct) there are some hotels that have taken the holiday season guest experience promotion to the next level by integrating multiple social media components into their distribution strategy.

One Revinate client, Destination Hotels & Resorts' the Terranea Resort, is a luxury oceanfront property located in Los Angeles’s nearby Ranchos Palos Verdes. Terranea is truly an exemplary resort offering a guest experience that is defined by superlative service, luxurious accommodations and an impressive array of dining and meeting facilities. While each of these qualities is notable to begin with, the resort reaffirms its esteemed position with a social media and online reputation presence that is as top-notch as the resort itself. To celebrate the holiday season, the resort has creatively promoted its “Terranea Traditions” program – which is “a celebration of over 100 events from Thanksgiving to New Years” – by employing a comprehensive, integrated social media strategy to extend the reach and awareness of the program.

Beyond the requisite website landing page describing the program, Terranea has incorporated a series of social media exclusive contests and offers to engage its audience in a more dynamic way and has benefitted from some of Revinate’s social media dashboard features along the way. The specific holiday contests the resort has run include:  

12 Days of Terranea Traditions Giveaways on Twitter – This compelling offer called for Terranea Resort Twitter followers to pay attention to the resort’s Twitter feed, as each day the resort offered a unique prize to a lucky follower who re-tweeted the message to his/her followers using the hash tag, #TerraneaTraditions. The resort promised followers that the prizes would be tweeted at specific times each day, which made Revinate’s Tweet Concierge a valuable asset when needing to schedule the messages up to days in advance. Also, with Revinate’s tweet tracker and Social Media Searches tool available to Revinators at the property, the hotel is able to easily measure the reach of the #TerraneaTraditions hashtag and, more importantly, evaluate the increase in brand discussion generated over time by the giveaway across all social media, including Facebook, Google+, Twitter various blogs, news and forums.

Terranea Traditions Pinterest Contest: Pin to Win – Earlier this year, we held a best practices webinar on Pinterest urging hoteliers and restaurateurs to engage on the emerging platform. While many hotels and restaurants continue to find the best way to interact in the space, Terranea has discovered an excellent way to not only build up a more engaged audience within Pinterest itself, but more importantly, incentivize pinning (links that direct users to a specific site) that drives direct, qualified traffic back to Terranea’s website. Moreover, by offering bonus points for pins that incorporate past #TerraneaTraditions experiences, the resort gains yet another golden opportunity to leverage user-generated content – a social marketer’s dream – when telling its brand story in the future. In addition, the resort has smartly cross-promoted this contest across all social channels to enhance participation, many of these mentions again track-able through Revinate’s tools. If hotels and restaurants are looking for ways to get inspired about what to do with Pinterest, here’s a great example to follow.    

To wrap-up, not only do these efforts provide online visibility of the Terranea brand, but they send more direct traffic to their website and, in turn, provide a potential impact on bottom-line profits.  They are text-book best practices in giving brand enthusiasts (fans, if you will) a reason to engage on the social space. Regardless of what the eventual return-on-investment (ROI) is for these campaigns, the return-on-engagement (ROE) is clear. Terranea wins, in the end, as stronger brand loyalty is built, user-generated content becomes more available, and the opportunity to weave increasingly personal Terranea tales about the guest experience for future seasons to come becomes a reality.

 

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How To: Twitter Tips for Hotels and Restaurants

With over 170 million active users, Twitter has firmly established itself as the leading microblog platform. For the traveler, Twitter can play a useful part at each phase of the guest experience. It can be used as a tool to learn more about the destination pre-stay, a means to discover ongoing specials and events during his/her time on-property and an opportunity to stay connected with and informed by the property long after the visit has ended. Accordingly, Twitter has truly emerged as an integral marketing tool in the social media toolbox that can extend both the reach of your brand's message and authenticity of your reputation.    

Once you have mastered the Twitter basics and, if you're a client of Revinate, understood our fully integrated Twitter client, Tweet Concierge, it may be worthwhile to consider leveraging some other ways to maximize your Twitter engagement.  Here's a round up of tips that have direct application for hoteliers and restaurateurs alike:  

Schedule Your Tweets -Tweet Concierge now allows you to schedule your tweets in case you don't want to be tied to your screen in the evenings and on weekends. Of course, Revinate will monitor and track all your Twitter activity, regardless of the Twitter client you use, so in addition, low-cost applications like HootSuite, TweetDeck and Buffer App may be worth a trial, as they provide auto-scheduling functionality (allow for scheduling your tweets at optimal engagement times) and are convenient for tweeting on-the-go from a mobile device. These features are especially important when you're looking to visually capture behind-the-scenes looks at your hotel or restaurant's operation in real-time or, more importantly, maintaining an active social media presence on the weekends when social media activity remains significant.  

Utilize #hashtag searches - Twitter.com, in addition to the services mentioned above, allows you to search for and save hashtags from both your desktop and mobile application. As a hospitality professional, you may want to do a hashtag search when attending a conference or event (so your tweets are tracked as part of a conversation) or include them in your hotel or restaurant's tweets when speaking about a particular topic (#amenities), neighborhood (#UpperEastSide) or interest (#dessert).   

Try out Advanced Search - Twitter's revamped search function can further assist you with identifying users and content that may be relevant for your hotel or restaurant to engage with. The search feature allows you to filter results by specific words, accounts or locations, which may provide useful if you are looking to engage with similar users that follow, for example, your local destination management company (DMC) or convention visitors bureau (CVB). 

Visit the Discover page - The microblog's Discover page offers a helpful way to uncover compelling re-tweetable content that you may have missed by showing you what content your followers have shared, favorited and re-tweeted.  The discover section also allows you to explore the browse category, which is extremely helpful when looking to follow travel-related brands, thought-leaders and small businesses. 

Limit Your Tweet's Length - To ensure that your content is most shareable, limit your tweet's length to 100-120 characters. Nothing is more annoying to an active tweeter than when a message is not easily re-tweetable (RT) due to its maxed-out length. By limiting this length, you allow your user to share the content easily, add a comment to your message and ultimately give your content the best chance at maximizing its reach.        

Love the URL Shortener - Building on of the previous tip, it is imperative that you utilize a URL shortener when creating your tweets to ensure you maximize the limited Twitter message real estate. Each of the tools in Step #1 also provide some handy click data information on each of your tweets, which can help you identify as a marketer which kind of content your audience is most interested in. For example, you may find after analyzing a month's worth of tweets that a list of your concierge's area recommendations was more popular than a photo of a new menu item. This kind of intelligence will be useful when putting together your content strategy in future months.  

Organize with Lists - In addition to Twitter's discover page, creating lists on Twitter is a handy, if a bit time consuming, way to organize and segment your followers that have specific areas of focus. In the hotel and restaurant context, this could mean putting together specific lists of followers that you would like your brand to engage with (e.g. food bloggers, past guests, travel writers) and can be used to optimize engagement with each focus group. 

Maintain a Balance - While it's important to engage in real-time on Twitter, inundating your followers with a barrage of tweets consecutively is a sure-fire way to diminish your influence. By scheduling some tweets in advance and incorporating some public replies into the mix, you will maintain an ideal conversation balance that is compelling yet not annoying to your network. 

Use Hashtags Judiciously - Even though the hashtag (#) can certainly be a helpful way of identifying new users that your brand may want to engage with, overusing them in your tweets without purpose will be just as detrimental to your Twitter effectiveness as an overlong tweet. When sending out a tweet, limit the use of hashtags to no more than three (one to two is most typical) and be sure that you are tagging appropriately. To learn more about how small businesses can leverage the hashtag, check out this recent Mashable article. 

Mix Up Your Content - As mentioned previously, the best rule-of-thumb with Twitter is finding a balance. This applies not only to the frequency of your posts, but also in terms of the kind of content that you decide to share. While there is no finite formula that will yield you optimal engagement levels, visual posts - whether that means sharing photos or video - typically receives higher levels of shares. With the emergence of Instagram as a tremendous photo-sharing application, a marriage between the two is a perfect union in the travel space where photos are paramount.

For more information on hospitality social media how-to as well as travel technology trends, be sure to follow Revinate on Twitter.

[Image source: creativeguerrillamarketing.com]

Revinate Integrates Klout Scores

Revinate clients will notice something new when they click on TweetConcierge or their Social Media Searches. Thanks to popular demand, we have integrated Klout scores into Revinate.

Klout has quickly emerged as a leader in helping brands measure influence. The scores they assign to users range from 1 to 100 with higher scores representing stronger influence. To read more about how to read Klout scores, please click here.

Klout integration allows Revinate users to see a tweeter's level of influence at a glance. We also show a list of "recent influencers" for each Social Media Search. Recent influencers are the most influential Twitter users talking about the topic. Click on the Klout logo or Klout score to see more about a particular user's area of influence, or click on their Twitter name to see their Twitter profile.

We know that adding Klout scores will help hoteliers who are looking to engage more closely with their guests. We know that part of being a hotelier is providing remarkable service, and it's always nice when your high service levels and excellent amenities are mentioned by guests when they tweet. Klout will help you see the true reach of a tweet and help you focus your efforts on the most influencer customers. Enjoy.

WSJ Article Controversy

Last week's Wall Street Journal article about hotels monitoring Twitter to the delight of guests got a lot of buzz. Granted, I work for a technology company in Silicon Valley and the vast majority of the people I work with have already embraced social media and developed strategies for monitoring their brands and engaging with customers, but is there really anything controversial about brands adopting new ways to improve their service levels?

This morning ehotelier.com ran an article called, "Why Hoteliers Should Avoid Social Media." The title alone scared me. If you are a brand conscious company and you know that guests are talking about their experiences on social networks and review sites, wouldn't you, at a minimum, want to know what they're saying? Of course the author, Jeremy Wagstaff, doesn't really mean that hotels should avoid social media as the title states. He later says,

Now I'm not averse to hotels and other companies using Twitter and Facebook to keep an eye on what people are saying about them. That's good, and, frankly, it should have happened a long time ago.

So if you're a hotel who is heeding Mr. Wagstaff's advice and monitoring tweets, wouldn't it be great to engage when you see the opportunity to smooth over an issue? The author says that because the response from the hotel is usually to tweet asking the guest to send a direct message, thereby taking the issue offline, nobody wins. Frankly, I have no idea why this is an issue. As a consumer, I understand that businesses need to make money and use discounts when needed to win customers, and incentives when needed to maintain loyalty. That's how business works. By responding, hotels are showing the public that they care. I don't expect them to publicize their responses, or offers, for the world to see. I know they're taking care of their customers and understand why it's prudent for them to take it offline.

It's also curious that Mr. Wagstaff doesn't appreciate the value of social media posts about experiences at hotels. He states

The value in social media-in any network-is the information it's carrying. Whines about the view from one's room isn't information. It's a whine.

Now, I don't know about you, but I love it when my friends let me know about their experiences, good and bad, at hotels. That's the very best sort of feedback I can get on whether on not a hotel is right for me. A personal, first-hand account is not only more valuable to me than impersonal brand advertising, it's also more important than online reviews from people I don't know.

One gentleman I engaged with in a LinkedIn forum about the WSJ article said that he was concerned that Twitter places unrealistic service expectations on hotels. I understand exactly where he is coming from. As a stickler for great customer service, I know how important it is to meet expectations. Many brands suffer because their service offerings don't hold up to customers' needs. Luckily, I think Twitter, today, is still in the 'surprise and delight' phase. In fact, almost all the folks in the WSJ article that received a response were surprised and delighted. They didn't expect a response. So the good news is that hotels have a bit of time to get their monitoring team in place before consumers expect a higher level of service. But they must act now and put the systems in place so they're ready when consumers expect to use these channels for communication.

Monitoring and responding is not brain surgery and it's not a crazy, costly endeaver as Mr. Wagstaff suggests. Many products exist to monitor Twitter, and Revinate's TweetConcierge feature allows our clients to monitor all mentions of their brand (or any keywords they choose) across not only Twitter, but the entire Web.

Rather than using the vehicles that already exist, Mr. Wagstaff's solution is to develop

rapid responses internally - a instant messaging service only accessible to guests, say, or a texting service.

To this I say, "What?? and Why???" Whether you like it or not, people are on social networks and they are talking about your brand. 55 million tweets go out every day and 300,000 people join Twitter every day. With the rapid adoption of innovative, new social communication channels, it's becoming more futile every day to try and force people to use closed, specialized systems. Social media is not going away any time soon so don't fight it... embrace it and watch it pay off.

A Deep Dive Into TweetConcierge

TweetConcierge is Revinate’s exclusive, fully-integrated Twitter client, customized specifically for busy hotel executives and staff who want to stay connected with clients and prospects across social sites. Every Revinate client has access to it. While it provides many benefits that you don’t get from Twitter, TweetDeck or other Twitter clients, here are the top 8 reasons to use it.

1) Keep it together

Using TweetConcierge as your Twitter hub allows you to see all your Twitter activity, in addition to the activity of your competitors in an organized way. If you have multiple properties in your corporate group, Revinate provides a standard platform so you have visibility into all twitter activity from multiple properties, regardless of how many people Tweet on behalf of the account. Tabs within TweetConcierge allow you to quickly flip between your tweets, tweets from your competition, mentions, direct messages and any activity related to Twitter campaigns that you have set up.

2) Save searches; Save time

If there are certain searches that you do all the time (eg ‘Hilton Chicago Rate Special’) for either your property or your competitor’s property, you can save your searches and simply use the drop down list to perform the search again.

3) Faster customer response

Simply click the links to Reply, DM or Retweet any tweet you see. Responding to questions and comments is quicker and easier than ever, which your customers will appreciate. And, all your activity is tracked, which is great for reporting KPIs.

4) Manage multiple Twitter accounts

If you are an agency or brand managing the social media for multiple properties, TweetConcierge allows you to log in once but tweet from any of your linked Twitter accounts.

5) Link Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Want a tweet to update the wall on your Facebook page? No problem. Simply link your Twitter account with your Facebook page and do double duty.

6) Advanced analytics

Track clicks to all URLs you post to Twitter and easily measure influence and reach.

7) Automatic URL shortening

Save time and effort when including a URL in your tweet. Simply type the URL and TweetConcierge will automatically shorten it for you so you don’t have to open another window and use another service.

8) Campaign tracking

Only TweetConcierge allows you to create campaigns so you can track sales and clicks across multiple tweets. For example, create a Twitter Promo Rate campaign and track all Tweets related to your Twitter specials.

Want more information or a demo? Contact Revinate today.