Give Your Hotel A Beautiful Social Presence

Social media success is harder than most people think, but making your page at least look professional is easy if you follow a few basic rules. Resolve to make your hotel’s social media pages look great in 2017 with these best practices. 

1. Size your cover images correctly

Cover photos are the largest image on your social media profile on Facebook and Twitter, so they’d better look good. Posting a cover image with the wrong size will lead to pixelization, weird stretching and even having parts of the image cut off.

Use these cover image sizing guidelines to avoid problems: 

Facebook: 828 x 315 pixels

Twitter: 1500 x 500 pixels

Besides cover images, correct sizing is a must for all your page’s visual assets. Check out this cheat sheet from make a websitehub.com for correct image sizing for all social media platforms.

2. Don’t use an external shot of your hotel for your cover image

It’s nice to give guests  a “wow” feeling when they first pull up to your hotel, but what’s more important is what they can see from inside the hotel. Use your cover image real-estate to help guests imagine what their stay will look like. Highlighting cool views of the city or interesting locations inside the hotel are great ways to do that.

3. Use a graphic to make text less boring (and get around Twitter’s 140 character rule)

The Westin Princeton surrounded a guest’s testimonial with an eye catching graphic, which not only made their timeline more appealing it also let them  bypass Twitter’s 140 character limit, since some of the text was part of the image.

4. Use your logo as your profile picture

There’s a time and a place for creativity and it’s NOT in your profile picture. Just use your hotel’s logo (preferably the version that references your property’s location). As you can tell by the example below, things get a little cluttered when you try to fit a more detailed image in the small profile photo area. Notice how the Westin Princeton’s profile looks cleaner than that of the Westin Chicago North West.

5. Feel free to use text in your cover photo

Using text in your cover photo is a great way to catch people’s attention.  The Westin Georgetown used text to in their cover to spread their brand messaging in a visual way. The Rittenhouse’s use of text in their Twitter cover image is especially well done, it gives an at-a-glance explanation of the hotel.

6. Resize your Instagram profile picture to avoid cutting off text

Since Instagram uses a circular profile image it’s easy for text to get cut off. Be sure to resize or reposition your image to avoid this issue.

7. Let guests do the work for you

High quality images submitted by guests are a great way to make your social media page prettier while showcasing real-life guest enjoyment. Kudos to Ritz-Carlton for this awesome example.

This week’s blog post was fueled by 2017 coffee, it’s like 2016 coffee but more futuristic. Until next time be well, and check back next week for the start of our McConnell Moves social media campaign.

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