For me, it all began some time ago with an article, written by a web marketing company, which asserted ‘Do you know what people are saying about your hotel on the Internet?’ That company even offered to monitor social media for individual hotels, as if a comment made on FaceBook would or could impact your hotel.

Instead of hiring a service to do this simple task, or worse yet, trying to do it yourself, take advantage of the growing number of free monitoring tools.

A quick way to start is to set up a free Google Alerts account for your hotel. It will search news, blogs, video, and more for your hotel name, then email the results to you. But, don’t get too excited, comments made about individual hotels on general social media are pretty rare. TripAdvisor is way ahead of the curve, they include the option of creating a free RSS feed to keep you up-to-date on any comments made about your hotel. Paying for someone to monitor social media for your hotel is really pretty silly.

Travel-Focused Social Media

There are only a handful of travel-focused social media sites and TripAdvisor is certainly the most prominent. The data shows that many travelers use TripAdvisor to either ratify their choice of a hotel or to find a hotel. User-generated comments made by actual travelers certainly have convincing veracity with consumers. This is the magic of Trip Advisor’s success.

When TripAdvisor was first launched, I predicted doom and gloom for our industry, I imagined piles of ‘dirty laundry’ being exposed online for the world to see. I could not have been more wrong. In fact, TripAdvisor reports an estimated 80% of all comments are positive rather than negative. Who would have thought that?

Get the full story at htrends.com