You may have garnered a few hundred, if you’re lucky thousand, new fans over the Christmas period through various social promotions but is there anything you can do differently in the coming year?

Calculating return on investment for social media is not an exact science but what can be said confidently today is that it plays an important role throughout all stages of the travel buying cycle. Most people will agree on the above but for a channel that’s often quite hard to justify to the top dogs, what really matters?

1.     Dynamic, contextualised, engaging content

It’s not just about likes and fans. Yes, you probably know that but what you may not know is that no matter how big your fan base, the average new post generally touches less than 20% of your followers. After all, the likes of Facebook and Twitter aren’t charities – they want travel brands to put more advertising spend against their pages. So to a greater or lesser degree what you spend is what you get. In fact the only way you can truly extend your reach without paying for advertising is with really strong, dynamic and engaging content, says Jason Antony, assistant vice president for digital engagement at the Viceroy Group. That’s something that hotel brands – which are very much like a family - typically struggle with. Hotel brands are like families and much of the time, hotels will see a fairly constant number of likes or engagements on social media and generally those come from the same people – ‘their family’. So, how do define success on social? Not by likes but when you suddenly see a hundred people liking a post versus the regulars.

2.     Your KPIs

Instead of looking at the number of engagements or fans, create a baseline from which you can measure engagement or the ‘viralness’ of a post and then record any incremental gains from that point. “If we can get the number of people who have stayed in our hotel or dined in our restaurant, and those same people then also engaged with us whether via email, on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram for the first time, then that is a success to me,” says Antony, “because they are now engaged with us physically and digitally”. For Viceroy, the top line is that all social contests should “hopefully” drive traffic back to the website. It may not be a may not be a true science but is some guide to how the content is performing.

3.     An injection of the right technology

One of our predictions for 2015 is that localised technology will be more widely used. According to Osama Hirzalla, Vice President Brand Marketing & eCommerce Europe at Marriott, in the future consumers will choose brands that will help them stay connected and provide seamless transition from one space to the other. Take iBeacons; they are a potentially great technology for counting people walking through the front door, but Antony wonders if that same technology could be used to attribute acquisition from a social media standpoint.  

Meanwhile, in the course of her research EyeforTravel global conference director Emily Assender has found that few players are doing dynamic content personalisation, partly down to a lack of understanding of what this means. Interestingly, David Meerman in his book Real-Time Marketing and PR argues that just 23% believe that real-time marketing is about making quick responses to mainstream events or injecting your business in social media conversations. Something to think about?

4.     If nothing else, Google +

“Google is our drug,” says Turochas Fuad, the founder of a vacation rentals firm in Asia Pacific’s fast-growing value segment. Of course there are different drugs for different markets (Google is still banned in China, of course) but Google is probably the most important. “We also play in Facebook and Twitter and we do so in all languages,” says Fuad, “but the drive to market successfully is about trying a combination of things”. Like TravelMob, everything Viceroy does digitally is in an effort to increase search engine optimisation and on that front Antony agrees that: “Google is brilliant for us”. His first advice to stakeholders in the firm is “to get your Google + sorted out properly”. Why? Because while everybody understands that TripAdvisor drives revenues, when people post a review on Google + it increases your carousel ranking. “Google + will give you additional ranking opportunities, if you play the game right. Post once a day or once a week and they will give you additional placement for real estate on your search key words,” he says. Add images from say your Instagram page into a Google + profile and the results are even better. EyeforTravel spoke to other hotel brands, who preferred not to be quoted on their thoughts on Google, but those that are playing in the search giant’s social platform couldn’t agree more - that this one is arguably the most important and on so many levels.