It has been a month since Google+ launched its business pages platform, and many hotels worldwide have already created their new presence in Facebook’s most interesting (and probably only) competitor. The advantages of Google+ over Facebook are still quite vague as the platform is evolving, and it’s too early to examine its marketing effectiveness.
However, it is clear that Google will include your Google+ business page/s in the search engine results, which means a big SEO factor to consider. Kingpin’s excellent blog post explains it best: “Due to the nature of their primary business, Google is able to use its leverage to make businesses that create and maintain a Page on its own social network easier to search on Google than pages or accounts on their competitors’ sites.”
Let’s have a quick look at some of the early adopters of Google+ business pages in the hotel industry:
The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company has a beautiful page thanks to the stunning photos of their properties worldwide. What they don’t have is textual content, which is crucial for optimizing their search engine rankings.
The luxurious Radisson Royal Hotel in Moscow has a nice page with rich and diverse content, from a beautiful video of a cruise along the Moskva River (selling the hotel without being too obvious) to a photo of the hotel’s team at the WTM (giving a face to the brand). More updates on a regular basis will enlarge the number of users that will add the hotel into their circles.
The MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Vegas knows a thing or two about engagement. The posts on the page encourage users to reply, which is fantastic in terms of feedback. The page already has a nice number of followers, so I wonder when will it start a ‘Hangout’ (a group video chat) with them. This tool can assist in “humanizing” the brand, which should be an essential part of any social media strategy for businesses.
