Royal Wedding boosts tweets
Published 16 May 2011
The social networking site Twitter enabled more than a million people to learn where the Duchess of Cambridge was staying for the Royal Wedding just hours after the location was made public.
That is the finding of University of Brighton research which involved monitoring tweets about the Goring Hotel where Kate Middleton and her family were guests.
Ioannis Pantelidis, senior lecturer in Hospitality and Culinary Arts, was studying the value of Twitter as a marketing tool for hotels and found that in the first five hours after the Goring was named, tweets about the hotel were generated by 58 users.
Each user, he said, had a number of followers from as few as 18 to one media celebrity who had 300,000. He said: "Nine hours after the news broke more tweeters joined in, bringing the potential audience to over a million."
He said none of the tweets were generated by the Goring staff yet it proved a great source of free advertising for the hotel.
"The conclusion is that the tweetosphere has a mind of its own and will react with or without you."
Royal wedding procession
He said the findings were good news for the Goring Hotel but Twitter could be equally harsh if things go wrong: "What happens when bad news about your hotel is broadcast in just a few hours and to a similarly large audience? You can either proactively attempt to limit the damage with positive tweets or you can let things calm down and hope for the best."
Twitter is now five years old and while many industries have adopted it as a business tool, hoteliers largely are still debating its usefulness. He said Twitter had matured from a "trendy social experiment" and it now had 200 million users: "It is about time that tweeting for business and the associated costs and measured appropriately like any other marketing or PR tool."
Mr Pantelidis found that most hotel chains which use Twitter had seen an increase in the number of followers in the past three years – Marriott's went up from 12,000 to almost 104,000.
He did, however, warn against reliance on follower numbers: "If you wanted to create a really large and meaningless following very fast you could hire someone to create various accounts and utilise existing software to automate a process that could yield a huge number of followers in a few weeks.
"But what good would that do? Would these followers be interested in any of your messages? Probably not."
Mr Pantelidis, who researches online consumer behavior in hospitality, said the reason true followers followed business-related tweets was value. Writing in Hotel Industry Magazine (hotel-industry.co.uk), he said: "And this is where hotels can shine – hotels can offer intangible value by engaging with its audience and offering extra value.
"Hotels can search for tweets from customers who may say they are coming to stay. The hotel could respond with an offer of an upgrade, as a thank you.
"Such acts cascade through other mediums and a happy and surprised customer becomes momentarily a virtual ambassador."
He said he believes the day will come when hotel reservations will be made via Twitter: "There have been efforts to develop such applications and I think this is where hospitality will really jump on the tweet-wagon.
"Restaurants seem to be slightly ahead of the game with efforts such as 'tweetservation', a tweet reservation service, and I'm certain that the big online reservation providers are designing something right now."
He said Twitter was likely to pay dividends for large hotel chains wanting to maintain strong online brands but the benefits were less obvious for small family hotels with limited marketing budgets.
"The truth is, if hoteliers decide to use Twitter as part of a communications strategy then they need to consider doing a proper job – or not one at all. The bottom line is – if you wish to maintain a loyal fan base for your hotel then Twitter could be one of the tools that will help you do so."
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Contact: Marketing and Communications, University of Brighton, 01273 643022
