17 Sep Luxury Hotels Gone Viral: A Month In Review

There are so many hotels out there and it’s harder than ever to raise your digital voice above all the social noise. I took a look to find a three interesting ways a luxury hotel has gone viral within the last month so perhaps we could all learn a thing or two. While usually the goal of going viral is scoring high quality natural links that boost your organic search ranking, we want oh so much more than that.

Your goal should be to burn the thought of your amazing hotel in the minds of all that see your content. So the next time they think about a booking a hotel in your area there’s no question who they think of.

 
I wanted to showcase that you can go viral besides your website or blog, and even the fact that you can get massive attention from another social influencer. Social media is definitely a hotel’s greatest marketing weapon these days and we will look in detail as to how you can make it work for you.

One other aspect I love about this form of marketing is that half the time you’re not even doing any work at all. Just sit back and let your customers do all the work for you.

Let’s start things off with a look at how a single Twitter picture turned into a marketing score for The Trafalgar Hotel.

The Power Of Twitter

What I like about Twitter is that it only takes a half second to hit that retweet button so users tend to share good content easily. Although this picture from the rooftop of The Trafalgar Hotel has 215 retweets, you have to remember that it still go in front of many many more eyes.

This picture was what got me started on this post as I was just browsing my daily Tweets and came across this cool picture. Before I knew it I was checking out the hotel’s webpage, following them on Twitter, Facebook and even Instagram. While they may have not got national attention, they’ve more than likely built a good amount of highly targeted follows and burned their brand into many minds.

Fairmont Vancouver Gets Itself Unwanted Social Attention

While The Fairmont remains my favorite hotel chain I won’t shy away from posting something that is most likely going to sting them a little bit. All is fair in hotel love and war I say! Recently the Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver came under scrutiny for an unpaid job posting.

So I’m sorry Fairmont, I just had to use this as an example to showcase how you need to scrutinize everything that goes online. It is too easy for something like this to come back and haunt you. I know no one will even remember this “incident” come next week so for now we shall use it as a learning tool for everyone else.

There was a good amount of social chatter and even press coverage about this job posting which is bad enough. What makes things even worse is the fact this latest news is what shows up for the hotel when you search for them by name. This is not something you want lingering around as it might deter a customer from booking with your hotel.

Notice the news about this “issue” showing up very high for branded Fairmont search results. Since this becomes an issue of reputation management at this point I would want to react very quickly. A simple news releases of their own or another positive stunt should get rid of that news rather quick.

See How The 1888 Hotel Used Instagram As A Viral Weapon

I’m always encouraging and preaching to my clients and readers that you need to do something really unique to stand out. The recently launched 1888 Hotel in Sydney Australia made major waves with their use of instagram. While checking in you could snap a selfie which would be showcased throughout the hotel and of course online via #1888hotel.

Needless to say that this not only resulted in a ton of fun content being made by their guests which they can use for their own marketing efforts. But, it caused just about every major news outlet and travel site to write about it which means tons and tons of organic links and social followers flocking their way.

Down right genius!

They have been live for a little over a month now and thanks to stunts like this they’ve attracted over 6000 new social followers across the usual platforms. This is an amazing start and if their marketing team keeps this up they will have a very successful first year and you know Team Luxury Branded wishes them well.

As for links….well check out this graph.