I looked at Supermarkets earlier in the week and then moved my attention to hotels. I took the top 25 Irish hotels on Tripadvisor and compared some of their Facebook & Twitter stats…
Findings
All of the hotels won a Travelers’ Choice award on tripadvisor in 2013, so clearly they’ve got the whole hotel thing nailed down. I thought it would be interesting however to see how they’re doing on social media.. it would all hotels to see how they stack up in comparison to this elite club of 25.
The average top 25 hotel has:
- Been on twitter for 3 years and 7 months, gaining 2465 followers and tweeting 1661 times.
- Accumulated 6115 likes on Facebook, has 325 people ‘talking about’ it and has a total of 4839 check ins.
All 25 have Facebook pages and 23 have twitter accounts. The two that don’t have their own dedicated twitter accounts (i spent quite a bit of time checking) are both Doyle Collection hotels (formerly Jurys Doyle Hotels). The Powerscourt Hotel (formerly The Ritz Carlton) set up a new twitter account & facebook page just a few weeks ago as part of their rebrand.
The reason Kelly’s Resort & Spa in Wexford currently has four times more people talking about it on Facebook than any other hotel is because it’s running a competition (free hotel break for two) and in order to enter, they’ve asked people to share and like their page and leave a comment. Their competition posts currently have a combined 4787 shares, 3425 likes and 2519 comments. Not bad, considering the competition doesn’t end for another 2 weeks… they key take away here (if you’re a hotel) is that running competitions is a great way to drum up exposure… if thousands of people like / share your stuff then your hotel is potentially being exposed to a 6 figure audience. Who needs paid ads, right?
Facebook Design
Metrics compared: Likes, Talking About, Check ins.
Also available on Flickr here.
Twitter Design
Metrics compared: Followers, Total Tweets, Age of the account.
Also available on Flickr here.
The Process
Just to keep everything transparent, I pulled all the data together in an excel sheet and made it publicly accessible on Google Docs.
I also did something i’ve been meaning to do for a long time… record a timelapse video of my photoshop work from blank canvas through to finished design. It took me approximately 6 hours to finish this ‘project’ from concept creation right through to publishing this blog post. The designs took about 4 hours in total and i’ll publish a timelapse video tomorrow showing the work involved in creating them.
Finally, i spent quite some time looking for an app that would tell you the age of a twitter account. Twitter recently changed their API so most of the existing apps out there don’t work. I didn’t want to have to write my own app to interact with the new API, but it was looking that way until i found http://twbirthday.com/.