What Your Bed and Breakfast Should Be Tracking And Why *

The powerful tool that should be part of your Bed & Breakfast marketing strategy to attract, reach and convert guests is social media.  Facebook is the most popular of all the social networks available.

Over a billion people globally use Facebook to connect to a variety of businesses. It is the go-to cache for information and integration of businesses.  Used to its full potential for motivating guests to take action, Facebook can be a driving force.

It’s critical to measure your page, group, ad and promotions success if you want to learn more about your customers and what they respond to.

Analyzing guest behavior allows you to test and adjust posts for more consistent and meaningful engagement.  Hopefully, this will lead to increased bookings.

However, understanding what to base your strategy on is not so simple. Facebook does have many metrics and insights at your disposal. It’s important to understand what you should be looking at if you want to optimize your social media presence.

For instance, the amount of ‘likes’ you have is no indication of how much engagement you will receive or how much traffic will spill over to your website. It’s hard to know who true guests, fans, and ambassadors really are.

With that in mind, here are the most important metrics you should be tracking on your small hotel’s Facebook page…

Page likes

While it’s great to have a high number of likes to increase your property’s potential online reach, this is probably the least vital metric because it’s not hard to boost your page likes with paid promotion.

It doesn’t guarantee bookings in the slightest though so don’t rest on your laurels even if you have 10,000 likes.

A steady increase, especially if you’re not paying to promote your page, is always a positive and a sign that guests are referring others to your business.

Engagement

Engagement includes likes, comments, and shares. This is the simplest and most common indicator of how your page and content are performing.

The most important of the three listed above is shares, because it shows the person is willing to spread word of your B&B or small hotel.

But in the grand scheme of things, high engagement means very little if it’s not translating into bookings.

So what should you use it for? To understand what kinds of posts attract the most attention and give your followers more of what they enjoy.

Reach

• Reach is basically the amount of people who see your your post and who can potentially engage with it.
• Organic reach is particularly informative, because it counts the amount of people who see your posts – without paid boosting. Once again, you want to see high numbers here.

If your reach isn’t as high as you might expect even as you gain more likes, you may need to consider if the time of day that you post is in correlation with when your audience is active and online.

Clicks

Clicks relate to post clicks and link clicks.

• A post click just means an individual has clicked some part of your post, like the image, but haven’t clicked through to your website.
• That’s where a link click comes in. The more link clicks the better because it means traffic is streaming from your Facebook to your website, usually the ultimate goal of the content you post.

Track your clicks to see what kind of posts are proving the most effective at pushing users through to your website.

Book now

Facebook has now enabled accommodation providers to insert a ‘book now’ button on their page which will link through to your booking engine, it will allow you to add a ‘book now’ widget to your business page. Otherwise, you can make it click through to your website).

This may be by far the best indicator of your social media success. Knowing the statistics behind this mechanism will give you the clearest indication of how social media is contributing to your booking revenue.

It’s important to keep track of changes to all these metrics over time if you truly want to develop a sound social media strategy.

If you want more tips on how you can create an engaging online presence for your business, follow the IAA Bed and Breakfast Blog and our Facebook Page.  

The IAA Bed & Breakfast Association helps new customers find your business.  You can start enjoying the benefits today for free by either claiming your business listing on our site or you can create your new business listing.