by Katie Clapp on February 28, 2011
Last month, Doug O’Reilly, Oliver Sohn and their Seventh Art Media team’s Facebook research struck a chord with our readers.
Industry insiders Geraldine Daly and Are Morch called it, “the most comprehensive Facebook piece I have seen to date,” and “the type of information we need more of.”
Seventh Art Media’s second comprehensive analysis – available in its entirety below – examines 135 hotel Twitter accounts and more than 120,000 tweets from November 1, 2010 to January 31, 2011 and identifies hotels’ best opportunities for finding and increasing their accounts’ value.
1. Commit to slow, quality growth.
As we developed our initial list of hotel Twitter accounts for our analysis, we noticed two phenomena that were striking: First of all was the number of “dead” accounts. These are accounts with several thousand followers that simply stopped functioning one day, but continue to gain followers and mentions that are never responded to or acknowledged.
The second phenomenon of note is the underperformance of highly hyped accounts. We’ve all seen our share of “top 10” lists of hotel Twitter accounts. In performing our list building due diligence, we combed through dozens of Google results for top hotel accounts that various authors recommended we follow. What we saw was startling. These lists in total yielded only a few reasonably performing accounts and significantly more failures—including several dead accounts.
Playing catch-up or making a goal of rapid, low quality follower growth creates minimal returns on the investment. Twitter accounts that commit to slow, quality growth and maintain engagement are reaping the rewards of their efforts.
2. Facebook and Twitter efforts are complementary, but should not overlap.
On average, accounts with a high volume of cross-posts between Twitter and Facebook significantly underperform the ones that handle each channel separately.
Facebook is an exemplary platform for creating reach and amplification but it requires a strong content pipeline and is weak in creating sustained engagement.
In contrast, Twitter is an engagement-driven platform that requires care and commitment to build — but once it moves past a threshold level of engagement and volume it rapidly becomes a valuable brand asset.
3. Follower growth – in and of itself – is a meaningless statistic.
Quality followers will engage and interact with a hotel via Twitter as well as amplify the hotel’s content. Unengaged followers are a black hole for content and add no value to a hotel’s social media efforts and investments.
The figure below lists the top 20 accounts in our study by value. While the top tier is dominated by hotel casinos and hotel brands, we see that some property-specific Twitter accounts have also built out a valuable asset. In just a few months’ time, the newly launched Cosmopolitan Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas has created the most valuable hotel Twitter account among all those studied. The highest valuation for an independent hotel’s Twitter account is the Roger Smith Hotel in New York City.
In both cases, these accounts have lower followings than some of their direct competition, but by focusing on engagement and building quality follower bases they have created far more value. So the question is clearly not “how many followers do I need?” but “how do I get the right followers?”
4. Twitter strategies need to be goal-oriented from day one.
Once these goals are established, the hotel team can build out a long-term roadmap to help overcome internal obstacles, establish an operational culture around commitment to the channel, and begin to earn its way to the top.
The top five performing accounts in Seventh Art Media’s study have a current valuation of over $100k and their values are exponentially growing. In Seventh Art Media’s estimation, hotel brands and properties at any level should be able to realize measurable positive ROI levels with proper goals, planning and organizational commitment in place. Once the asset is built, maintenance costs will drop in relation to returns. The time to invest is now.
Read the full report here:
