Many hotels used to ask their followers/fans in social media to get engaged with the brand - and it often worked. But now they appear to have changed tack.
Ryan Solutions did some analysis of shared social media posts from 100,000 hotels and resorts over the last 12 months to see what is going on.
It looked at the posts that had some kind of request for "engagement" (such as "Share this post for a chance...") compared to those that did not, in order to see the levels of sharing by users.
Asking for a retweet, for example, did not work - simple as that.
But other factors had very different results.
Ryan Solutions says that compared to the same analysis made some three years ago, there is a marked drop in engagement even when brands do not ask for some kind of engagement.
This fall is somewhere in the region of 15%-20%.
Yet the average engagement on social media posts that do ask for engagement has grown by more than 10%.
It continues:
"This trend is exaggerated when we look just at Facebook comments and shares where engagement on normal posts dropped by 43% while engagement on posts that ask for comments or shares grew by 77%.
"Some marketers understandably don’t want to play this game, but the numbers look good for those that do.
In other words: don't ask, don't get.
NB:Social media image via Pixabay.