5 Indispensable Instagram Features for Hotel Marketing

Instagram should be part of any social media strategy for hotels. The platform offers various features that provide incredible benefits for showcasing the best of hotels while boasting an astounding 700 million active monthly users! With even more predicted growth, the travel industry should utilize this platform to reach potential customers. Let's explore the five top Instagram features that will help boost your hotel's marketing strategy! 

1. Business Page

There are two types of account profiles on Instagram: personal and business. A personal page is meant to share your content with friends & family; a business profile is intended to strengthen your brand and heighten awareness of your product or service. For hotels, it's crucial to have a business page because these allow users to contact the hotel more easily with specific buttons that are only available on business profiles. When you create or switch to a business page you also get data on the performance of your posts, stories, and you can even promote your content!

2. Instagram Insights

A valuable tool for creating a hotel social media marketing plan that works is accessing Instagram Insights, which allows you to see statistics and specific numbers related to the performance of each of your posts. With the knowledge of which posts performed well, you can recreate those types of posts and expect more results by creating content which you know already works well. For example, if your hotel boast a beautiful pool and photos of this amenity always performs better than other amenities, you should adjust your social media strategy to reflect this.

3. Strengthen your Brand

Because of the visual nature of Instagram and your ability to curate its content, you can reinforce what type of hotel you are through this medium. Are you a boutique hotel or a more affordable option? Showcase the features that relate to this and make sure your photos and videos accurately reflect what guests can expect when they walk in the door! For example, a budget-friendly hotel may show an image of coffee to showcase this daily amenity while a more luxurious hotel may take a video of the line up at their extensive hot breakfast buffet. Although these amenities are unique to each hotel, Instagram can still be a viable method for creating appropriate expectations for potential guest.

4. Stories & Live Video

One of Instagram's newest features is significantly underutilized. Many hoteliers have yet to take advantage of "live video" and "stories." Live video provides an automatic notification for anyone looking at the app telling them that you are live. This automated notification draws more eyeballs to your video and gives you a higher number of impressions! Stories work in a similar way. Although stories do not provide an instant notification, a circular icon appears on the top bar of users newsfeeds and stays there for 24 hours or until the story is viewed. This icon also provides a boost that gets more people to view your content.

5. User-Generated Content

The basis of Instagram is for users to create content that is exciting and entertaining. With so many people active on the channel, it's easy for users to tag pages and add locations. If hotels are active on Instagram guests can tag the hotel and create hype. Most users are excited to go on vacation, stay in a hotel, and show their photos of their activities to their friends. Images in which people tag the hotel are showcased under a tab on the hotel's profile page and are also shown to the posting user's followers. That means free network advertising for the hotel who only needs to have an account to reap the benefits!