These trends clearly point out that Facebook’s growth years are behind us, and that after the hunting years, now it’s the time for harvesters to settle in. While sweepstakes may still be fairly successful on Facebook in the short-term, to make a Facebook page successful it has to be an engaging experience (more on this at five tips for a strong Facebook page).

However, the hotel business is still dominated by hunters that look for criteria like ADR, occupation and RevPAR as the be-all-end-all of hospitality success. And this is why many are turning to Twitter – it is the perfect hunting ground. An open community, where brands have settled in successfully both for improving customer service, but also for offering deals, much like flash sites do.

This article offers five tips for having a successful hunting campaign on twitter:

1. Gather twitter profiles.

The first thing to do when starting a twitter campaign is to listen to the ongoing conversations. Make it easy for guests to share their twitter profiles with you.

Ensure you keep track of those on your CRM – they are public information after all!

2. Read tweets of next arrivals.

A good way to check the mood of your next arrivals is to check their twitter feeds.

Based on the last few tweets and whether they were recent or not, you will be able to see if they are “looking forward to the vacation” or “dreading the business trip”.

Use that information at check-in to service them better.

Read More at Tnooz

Here are some interesting tidbits from data compiled by Bime Analytics, which polled a voluntary sample of more than 10 million Google+ users:

• A silent majority exists — in a big way. The study found that a whopping 83 percent of Google+ users are currently classed as inactive. It bears mention, though, that other social networks have the same issue: A small portion of very active users, and a large silent majority of lurkers or just plain inactive accounts. For example, research indicates that 80 percent of Twitter users have Tweeted fewer than 10 lines, and 40 percent of users have never sent a single Tweet.
• Students are taking over. As of mid-August, the dominant occupation for Google+ users was “student.” That’s a big shift from the month prior, when the dominant occupation was “engineer.”
• It’s still a man’s world. The percentage of female users was 30 percent, a slight increase from the month prior when women made up 28 percent of Google+’s user base.

See more at GIGAOM

D4 Hotels, Dublin celebrate their 15^th week at the top of the list.

Download the list as a PDF here

(List correct as of 10^th January 2011)

The list is by no means final so if you feel we’ve missed you out, please let us know by commenting below and your hotel/group could appear on next weeks list.

The list is based on the number of fans the Facebook page has and is open to all hotels in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland.

This list only considers Facebook Pages as opposed to groups and personal profiles.

A Page or a Group, which is better? Well the answer to that depends on you and what works for your business.

Facebook Groups:

1. Set up for more personal interaction, they are highly active and require constant engagement.
2. Connected to the profile of the people who administer them.
3. When you post something as a group administrator, it appears to be coming from you and is attached to your personal profile.
4. Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause.
5. If the group is under 5,000 members, group admins can send messages to the group members that will appear in their inboxes.
6. Permissions settings make it possible for group admins to restrict access to a group, so that new members have to be approved.
7. Groups can’t host applications.
8. You can advertise your group.

Facebook Pages:

1. Access to a Page, however, can only be restricted by certain ages and locations.
2. Page admins can send updates to fans through the Page, and these updates will appear in the “Updates” section of fans’ inboxes.
3. There is no limit on how many fans you may send an update to, or how many total fans a Page can have.
4. Pages can host applications, so a Page can essentially be more personalized and show more content.
5. Pages can benefit from social ads that publicize the fan connection between a Page and a specific user.
6. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.

Neither Groups nor Pages have great moderation features. If someone posts spam on your Group or your Page, you have to remove it manually, and you can also remove specific members.

So it’s up to you who best suits your business right now and going forward.

Be sure to check back every Monday to see if your hotel has made the list!

The Chesterfield Hotel in Mayfair, London is at the top of the table for the16th week running now, well done!

KWest Hotel & Spa are new to the list this week, well done, Keep up the good work!

Dowload This List As PDF Here

(List is correct as of 20^th July 2010)

The data in this list differs slightly to that of our Facebook list and is ranked according to the hotel’s influence on the twitter verse.

We’ve used twitter.grader.com to rank each hotel on twitter. This clever little app considers many different factors including number of followers, number of followings and number of posts (among many others). This creates a score, enabling each twitter account to be ranked out of all the accounts that have been graded in the twitter network.

It basically gives you an idea of the impact each tweet has.

The grade is out of 100 and represents the percentage of accounts that have less of an impact than yours. For example, a TwitterGrade of 95 means tweets from your account have more of an impact than tweets from 95% of all other graded accounts on twitter. Pretty impressive hey?!

As with all our lists, we’ve done our best to recognise every contender for the list but a few are bound to have slipped through the net. If you think your hotel should be included on the list, please let us know by commenting below, remembering to include your “@” twitter account name.

The list is open to all hotels in the UK.

Be sure to check back each week to see if your hotel has made the list.

1. The future of revenue management will include a rapid evolution of data as a strategic asset that can drive future decision-making.

2. Hoteliers will track, analyze, and maximize social networking platforms as an integral part of revenue management – leveraging the power of tools that help them in managing consumer review sites and other forums. They will take a proactive approach to user-generated hotel reviews, blogs, videos, and images.

3. Revenue directors will reinvent their approach to be even more proactive and creative – conducting more research, focusing on demand generators, developing relationships with the competition, shifting market share, developing the hotel’s reputation, and directing sophisticated channel management.

4. Automated revenue management technology will become the dominant practice, quickly delivering significant increases in revenue and return on investments to those who adopt it.

5. The hospitality industry will focus time and resources on developing strong revenue executives—headlinedby the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) – who can deliver the best revenue strategy, top-line revenue, and bottom-line profitability.

Also serving as a publishing sponsor of the report is Smith Travel Research, the hospitality industry’s leading information and data provider.

“By relying less on spreadsheets and revenue directors with strong Excel skills, and more on central storehouses that compile all enterprise data and help hotels better analyze and process it, hotels will advance the impact of revenue management,” said Kristi White, TravelClick’s Director of Revenue Optimization. “Business Intelligence tools will be critical in this effort, producing objective, actionable information and analysis, and reducing subjective interpretations.”

White underscores the importance of sticking with a strategy, through good times and bad. “During good times, hoteliers are more apt to pay attention to their own needs and price as a benchmark of what the market will bear,” she emphasized. “During downturns, they shift to groupthink and merely follow the herd to the bottom of the bucket. There are always opportunities to maintain or grow rate – even in a down economy.”

For full article see Hotel Marketing

Report available for purchase on HSMAI Site

New stats released yesterday by Twitter revealed that users now send out more than 50 million tweets per day. That means every second, 600 tweets fly through Twitter’s network. If you’ve ever followed a trending topic ex. XFactor, Haiti, Thierry Henry you’d believe it.

The stats so far:

• 2007 – 5,000 tweets per day.
• 2008 – 300,000 tweets per day.
• 2009 – 2.5 million tweets per day.
• 2009 end of year – 35 million tweets per day.
• 2010 – 50 million tweets created per day.
  For more stats

50 Million Tweets a day 2010

An example of usage growth, I first heard about the Newry incident via twitter the night before last. I heard it on Twitter before the news or radio. The first ten or so tweets where people in the area, then I saw Skynews, BBC and other news channels tweet. Within another couple of seconds, I read a post in spanish and then french. All within seconds and minutes.

Twitter is my source of real time news and I know there are plenty more people out there just like me. The fact is that more and more people are using twitter like a search engine for research and news. It is definately the most up to date tool online and we are getting information quicker than ever before from sources that may never before have had a voice. Don’t get me wrong it isn’t used in isolation but it’s part of an ever increasing tool box we have to keep ourselves informed.

The growth is apparent too from news channels, radio stations, individuals involved in media, businesses as well as the big brands. It certainly present a world of opportunity for hospitality businesses.

The end of year Twitter stats for 2010 should make compelling reading but let’s keep a watchful eye on Buzz.

Five years ago, Gmail was just email. Later we added chat and then video chat, both built right in, so people had choices about how to communicate from a single browser window. Today, communication on the web has evolved beyond email and chat — people are sharing photos with friends and family, commenting on news happening around them, and telling the world what they’re up to in real-time. This new social sharing is valuable, but it means there’s a lot more stuff to sort through, and it’s harder to get past status updates and engage in meaningful discussions.

Today, we’re launching Google Buzz, a new way to start conversations about the things you find interesting and share updates, photos, videos and more. Buzz is built right into Gmail, so there’s nothing to set up — you’re automatically following the people you email and chat with the most.

We focused on making the sharing experience really rich by integrating photos, videos, and links. No more fuzzy little pictures: Buzz makes it easy to quickly flip through photos and experience them the way they were meant to be seen: big and full-resolution. And videos play inline so you can watch them without opening a new window.

You can choose to share publicly with the world or privately to a small group of friends each time you post. And you can connect other sites you use, today there’s Picasa, Flickr, Google Reader, and Twitter, so your friends can keep up with what you’re doing around the web — all in one place.

To make sure you don’t miss out on the best part of sharing, Buzz sends responses to your posts straight to your inbox. Unlike static email messages, buzz messages in your inbox are live conversations where comments appear in real time.

You can follow the specific people whose posts you want to see, but Buzz also recommends posts from people you’re not directly following, often ones where your friends are having a lively conversation in the comments. If you’re not interested in a particular recommendation, just click the “Not interested” link and your feedback will help improve the recommendations system. Buzz also weeds out uninteresting posts from the people you follow — collapsing inactive posts and short status messages like “brb.” These early versions of ranking and recommendations are just a start; we’re working on improvements that will help you automatically sort through all the social data being produced to find the most relevant conversations that matter to you.

For all those times when you want to share something but aren’t in front of your computer, Buzz is also available on your phone. When you’re out in the real world, a lot of the information you want to share often has to do with where you are: for example, you may want to talk about a new restaurant you discovered or the score of the game you’re watching. So rather than simply a small screen version of the desktop experience, Buzz for mobile brings location to the forefront and makes it easy to have conversations about places. In addition to checking out buzz from people you’re following, you can also see nearby buzz from the people around you.

We’ll be rolling out Google Buzz to everyone over the next few days; you’ll see a new “Buzz” link under “Inbox” when it’s on for your account. We’re still working on some features to make Buzz work well for businesses and schools, so it isn’t yet available in Google Apps, but stay tuned. If you want to learn more in the meantime, visit buzz.google.com or check out the Help Center.

Source: Gmail Blog and Google Buzz

This scenario is not science fiction. It, or one similar to it, happens every day in airline cabins as tech-savvy passengers use social media tools to disperse information among their networks. Are airlines ready for this new world?

Although most of the industry is engaged online to some extent, there remains a lingering notion among a number of legacy airlines that social media is, to quote one senior executive, “just a silly fad.” Perceptions like these are reinforced by the fact that social media has yet to make a measurable impact on the bottom line of any carriers. But airlines such as JetBlue Airways and Virgin America are betting that their investments of time and resources in social media will pay off in the not-too-distant future.

While social media continues to evolve and the tools used to reach an engaged online community may change, the paradigm shift in customer habits is here to stay, say media analysts and airlines that have bought into the concept. “Shame on those airlines who think they can ignore this and that it will go away,” says Henry Harteveldt, a travel industry analyst with Forrester Research.

JetBlue has more than 1.4 million followers on Twitter, the micro-blogging site that allows users to update their networks in 140-character posts, called “Tweets.” That is more than any other airline, and among the higher number of followers of any corporation. JetBlue’s attention to social media requires significant resources. A team of six in the corporate communications department monitors the feed until the last passenger has left the last airport each day, says Morgan Johnston, manager of corporate communications.

Get the Full Story at Aviation Week

Firstly I went to DublinCity Traffic Cams where it gives you live (well nearly live about 10 mins lag) views of main routes in and around Dublin. I also searched Google, again the information was not up to date some items where a few hours old. Of course we always have the radio however now we also have twitter. I have definitely found it excellent for breaking news on events happening right now. So I went on Twitter Search and put in ‘Dublin’ & ‘Traffic’ as search terms. I started following AA Roadwatch and also sent them a message asking about my route home. Didn’t get a reply but saw lots of tweets about conditions and driving times.

Long story short, couldn’t get my little car up a little hill. Wheel spin city, so thankfully the LUAS (that’s our wonderful tram system for our group members outside Ireland) was working. From Twitter I got real time information on the road conditions, traffic delays and the public transport situation. It was excellent and of huge value to me and the others in the office. I see a great opportunity there for hotels to really use this tool to keep people informed, in times like this. You would be providing valuable information to people travelling in your direction, a customer service tool for guests who have booked as well as potential guests and quite importantly shows you are part of the community.

The possible affects:
• Provide valuable information to the Twitter community and your followers
• Provide Twitpics of your hotel, your guests do. Example View from Jurys Cork during Flood
• Use a customer service tool to answer query from guests
• Increase awareness of your Hotel
• Increase followers
• Pick up Bookings – one hotel I noticed today had a ‘Stranded Offer’ great idea and very reactive to the current situation.

Now the effect of this will vary depending on Twitter usage in your locality and country as a whole. From my observations in Ireland; Dublin, Galway, Cork and Belfast have quite active Twitter communities however that is not to say Hotels outside these areas would not benefit from using it as your potential guests could live in these areas.

There is no doubt about it the weather in Ireland and the UK is horrendous at the moment and it most certainly is affecting Hotels. Having spoken with a number of hoteliers between today and yesterday, people are certainly feeling the effects and some are closing temporarily due to the volume of cancellations and problems with access.

So our advice, if your hotel is not affected and is completely accessible is to let Twitter help you get the message out there.

Facebook can be used as well however it will only update your fans, Twitter will update the tweeting world.

For more on Social Media Marketing for Hotels join our group on Linkedin.

Good luck and drive safely if you are in an affected area.

Asked what their company had done to minimize negative comments in the past, nearly one-half reported having directly engaged with the consumer. The second-most-common strategy was longer-term in focus: trying to improve products and services.

A few respondents had tried to get offending content removed, but that tactic can backfire and cause further negative remarks against the brand. Econsultancy noted that only 12% of companies tried to create their own content to offset negative consumer opinions in search results, and that more could go this route.

Brand monitoring was an important aspect of Twitter usage as well, among the companies surveyed, though publicizing new content was the top activity. About one-quarter of companies were using the microblogging site for customer service or gathering customer feedback.

Get the full story at emarketer.com