It’s that time of the year again, time to break out the content calendar and lay out a social media game plan for your hotel or portfolio of hotels in 2024. For hotel social champions, it’s all about staying ahead by exploring the latest social media trends, aligning your goals with your brand’s objectives, and creating engaging content that resonates with your audience. It’s also a great time to evaluate last year’s content calendar to find out what worked and what needs tweaking. This webinar will cover everything from your New Year resolution posts all the way to your social media end-of-year celebrations.

And looking at it this way, at this calendar, it can look a little daunting. But we also know that travelers on each one of these days are looking for inspiration. Which social media does for travelers. They’re looking to for events. They’re looking for what your hotel experience is going to be like. So they are actually coming to your social media accounts on each one of these days looking to make purchase decisions. And if you don’t have content there, they’re not going to find anything. So you’re probably asking how we’re going to fill out this entire calendar. How are we going to go 12 months or we’re going to do it by kind of dissecting and hopefully splitting this calendar into four pieces. And hopefully this will really help us kind of efficiently plan our calendar for next year.

Let’s start with holidays/seasonal calendar. The easiest way to fill up a calendar is major holidays. We just had Halloween pass. This is a fantastic post. Lots of engagement, 4th of July, spring break, Thanksgiving over the holidays. We’ve got the holidays coming up.

We know this is a big travel time during these holidays, but very easy to get a lot of engagement on these types of posts. Now, if we want to take it up a notch and each time you see these kind of little calendar notifications here, it’s going to represent a way that we can kind of level up that social strategy tie in property features here.  Kind of find that correlation between the holiday and maybe the guest experience that they can have. And you’re going to notice that trend a lot in these examples. 

These are important to highlight and a great way to fill your content calendar as well. This was half happy national Wine Day and they did a fantastic job of actually using a local attraction to celebrate this right. One way you can level up and I’ve talked about this before, tagging those local businesses, they’re going to be more inclined to engage with your post if you’re tagging them, if they see that you’re publicly supporting their business, whether it be an attraction, whether it be an event center, anything like that.

Social media champions at hotels, love events. They are our occupancy drivers. So this is a great example here. We’ve got the New York City Marathon coming up. We’re encouraging our runners to stay with us during the event. And this is also a great time to encourage shares and tag. So when is the height of an experience at an event, the height of experience at a game Taylor Swift concert. That is that is the thing that’s really been that that has really been kind of pushing the hotel industry as far as air goes. Those concert goers are posting their pictures immediately as after the concert.

They’re looking at videos of the concert from different angles. They’re seeing everything that they experience. This is the height of engagement. This is when you ask for shares tags that potentially if you get permission, you could use later down the right the line and kind of use in a content library for you. 

Let’s move forward to our content series calendar. This is I think the way that travelers that consumers are just consuming content right now. You think about Netflix, you think about Hulu, Amazon Prime, all of these are in series, right? It’s episodic. We want to wait until the next season. We want to wait until the next episode. This is a very easy way to fill your content calendar, you know, as in having a plan here, right? So if you’re unsure if you’re in that 50% of unsure of what I post, if you have a biweekly or even a monthly employee spotlight, for example, right. That’s 12 of your hotel members that you could spotlight over the course of a year.

So as we fill in our content series, as I as I mentioned before, this calendar that you’re seeing right here in the cadence of this, this is every first Tuesday, every last Wednesday of the month, and then every biweekly Saturday. That’s three particular series. I just gave three examples there. There’s tons more, especially if you have a food and beverage outlet, right?

Maybe a dish every month that you’re sharing. You know, these are the types of things that can fill a calendar very, very quickly. But I mentioned before one of the most important last year’s calendar. So any, you know, successful social strategy is going to answer the question why is this successful? Why is this post We are not just throwing things to the wall now and hoping it sticks. We these social platforms have enough data to show you whether a post is working or not. Right? So this was a piece of content shared on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn Analytics. It reached over a thousand travelers and had over 140 people engaging with it. This is fantastic analytics. This clearly worked. It has a strong, you know, obviously it’s tied to an event of a nearby attraction. It had a strong call that call to action. The next thing that we can do is boost and use social ad spend. 

When you see a post like this performing, in fact, every single social partner that we have or client that we bring on has ad spend included to help boost especially those posts that are making a ripple effect that are resonating with your audience.

So tweak your messaging. If you’re not seeing something, work for you. If you’re or opposite if you’re seeing something that really works, tweak your messaging on the next one to match that and to mirror that so you can continue to capitalize on those social media gains.

And finally last year’s content calendar, we now have a really nice blueprint for what our year looks like in 2024. But I will say some of these weeks only have three posts. I know this seems like we’re full here, but our sweet spot for Travel Media group for our social partners is 4 to 5 posts. I mentioned it before. Your guest and travelers are on these pages every single day. They are looking to book every single day. So 4 to 5 posts is really the minimum that you should be doing when it comes to social media.

So I wanted to include some extra kind of ideas to fill in those gaps when you whenever you might need. You know, that other piece of content travel tips very, very great brings a lot of value to your following. I love this one because it’s talking, you know, they’ve done a great job of taking that seasonal calendar, right?

Talking about hiking in the fall, giving some hiking shoe recommendations, travel list. This is always also great quizzes, trivia, any of that stuff that really gets your your your audience engage, you learn a little bit more about them and hopefully you’re looking at those analytics that we talked about to see what they’re responding to as well. And then the one thing that I just can’t stress enough, if I could make every single one of these posts better, the way I would do it is with video.