Over a period of three months, NYC’s Seventh Art Media tracked the content performance of 75 hotel brands on Facebook to highlight social media strategies that deliver on brand impressions and those that don’t. The company identified six key factors for hotels and resorts to take into account in order to see a lasting marketing performance on Facebook.

Facebook surpasses Google in US online traffic, Mark Zuckerberg is Time Magazine’s Person of the Year 2010, and Goldman Sachs invests in Facebook at a $50bn valuation – we clearly have arrived in the new Era of Social Media.

As we transition from a search-based to a social media-based online culture, and as consumer attention shifts from paid media to earned media, it is increasingly important for hotels and resorts to focus on the business opportunities that come with the creation of social currency and social capital for their brands. Having a network is easy – getting attention is not.

But hospitality and travel are among those industries and topics that have the natural opportunity to realize strong levels of online community engagement, and as a result, grow their brands and businesses through strategic social media marketing.

This whitepaper presents the results from a comprehensive analysis of basic forms of consumer-generated brand impressions on Facebook relative to (a) content type, (b) community size, and (c) hotel brand status (i.e. chain vs. independent).