Sean Walsh
Sean is a Director at Intelligency heading up our digital marketing and client services operations. Sean has 15+ years experiencing working both in-house and agency with brands including Lloyds, Alstom, Hitachi, Lufthansa, Viaplay, DFDS Seaways and Mercedes-Benz.
London is one of the most popular cities in the world, attracting a wide array of people from sight seeing tourists at Buckingham Palace to international commuters heading into The City to broker deals. As a result, you’ll often find hotels inundated with bookings, and each one thinking of new and creative ways to get the edge. Therefore our analysts wanted to take a look at how the famously glamorous hotels in London are using their social media channels to fend off rivals and who is making the most of these instruments.
Which brands are the most popular on social media?
There are three key channels that hotels use to contact with visitors across social media: Facebook, Twitter & Instagram. All three provide a different function with Twitter allowing you to keep your followers updated on the events at the hotel or connect with them. Facebook offers numerous opportunities to showcase your success, with a rating function and a review section, where past and potential customers can take a look at the hotel. Finally, Instagram is a fun opportunity to showcase the brand in it’s best light, by highlighting recent events that have been taking place, notable guests or the quality of the rooms, restaurant and bar. The chart below shows the popularity of 25 five star hotels in London across Facebook, Instagram & Twitter:
| Hotel | Twitter Followers | Instagram Followers | Facebook Likes |
| Claridge’s | 60,772 | 265,000 | 35,884 |
| The Dorchester | 52,234 | 100,000 | 45,049 |
| The Ritz | 47,100 | 96,000 | 77,255 |
| The May Fair Hotel | 34,500 | 23,100 | 48,252 |
| The Goring | 24,609 | 46,600 | 13,448 |
| Corinthia Hotel London | 24,041 | 55,000 | 24,525 |
| Lanesborough | 12,552 | 50,200 | 9,693 |
| Hotel Cafe Royal | 9,731 | 50,300 | 22,296 |
| The Stafford London | 9,345 | 4,991 | 1,654 |
| Milestone Hotel | 8,107 | 3,351 | 6,059 |
| The Landmark London | 7,651 | 20,700 | 15,705 |
| Hotel 41 | 6,165 | 2,990 | 4,553 |
| Dukes London | 5,728 | N/A | N/A |
| The Arch | 5,176 | N/A | 4,142 |
| Flemings Mayfair | 4,936 | 16,100 | 5,102 |
| The Rubens at the Palace | 4,416 | 2,618 | 6,497 |
| The Trafalgar St James | 3,818 | 4,706 | 5,576 |
| The Beaumont | 3,459 | N/A | N/A |
| Cadogan Gardens Hotel | 3,288 | 5,905 | 2,047 |
| Taj 51 Buckingham Gate | 3,287 | 14,000 | 8,027 |
| Threadneedles Hotel | 2,682 | 950 | 1,288 |
| The London Edition | 999 | N/A | 5,474 |
| The Mandrake | 486 | 21,400 | 2,019 |
| The Academy Hotel | 72 | 1,000 | 1,543 |
| The Berkeley | N/A | 76,600 | 12,922 |
Our analysts found a number of interesting stories from looking into these hotel’s social accounts. Primarily, we found that Claridge’s was the most popular brand across Twitter & Instagram, likely due to the hotel being renowned for its high class and luxury but it also serves the dual function of being a Michelin star restaurant. However on Facebook, The Ritz was the most liked page with Claridges sitting further back in fourth.
How engaged are hotels on social?
An important element of using social media should be interacting and engaging customers. Interestingly, Facebook allows messenger pop ups to encourage interactions and promote response times and yet only six hotels make use of this feature, with only Hotel Cafe Royal and Milestone Hotel informing users of their response time.
Additionally, replies on Twitter can showcase that a hotel cares about the happiness of it’s clients, and therefore should be receptive and treated as a ‘digital front desk’. Since the start of 2019, The Ritz has been the most communicative London hotel, directly responding to questions 67 times, more than twice as much as the next highest The Dorchester (23) and Landmark (22). Hotel 41, Dukes, The Beaumont, Flemings, Trafalgar St James and The Academy all failed to reply once. Whilst heavy hitters and a favourite of the royals, The Goring only replied to its customers 3 times.
Are hotels in London, making the most of social media?
Social Media platforms have developed an awful lot since their inception, and consequently brands can now not only use the sites to influence and push content to potential buyers, but also create an entire commercial ecosystem. Additionally, Facebook also allows hotels to provide a ‘Shop’ section meaning visitors to the page can buy products, thus providing your commercial team with an alternative outreach strategy, and again, only 24% of the hotels have activated this, with The Landmark again being an early adopter in the industry.
M Moreover, Instagram has a number of additional functions such as Reserve, Call and Email, which can be added to your profile. With a generation who is spending an increasing amount of time on social media, it is well worth having accessible buttons that allow for the user contact the hotel efficiently and may lead to an uplift in conversions. Positively over 90% of the hotels listed have the ‘call’ function on their profiles, and yet only 20% are enabled for reservations. Interestingly, only 5 of the 25 hotels allow their visitors to choose from all three options, whilst The Dorchester is the only hotel in the list which doesn’t use any of these features.
Want to know more about growth rates in hospitality?
fiacuity specialises in analysing the digital activity for a brand to assist with identifying opportunities and threats as well as advising on ROI strategies.
