In an age commonly referred to as “the roaring ’20s”, the advancement of technology has changed the face of practically every industry in the world, from banking & finance to the way we watch films and sure enough, the hospitality industry is no exception to the rule.
Long gone are the days where people flick through phone books for information or filter through the classifieds section in newspapers for the information or products/services they’re after. When everything can be instantly accessible at the end of someone’s fingertips, why would you?
The beautiful thing about technology advancing so quickly is it has made the world a much smaller place than ever through the use of apps and social media platforms.
We’ll be covering the wonderful world that is social media, and explaining the various benefits of using it as a venue, and if you’re not, the reasons why you should be as it could mean big business for your venue or event space.
1. Your customers are using social media
According to Avocado, there are 45 million social media users within the UK, equalling 67% of the country’s population. Other surveys reveal the average social media user spends on average three hours a day on social media.
These users are frequently revisiting social platforms throughout the day to keep up to date with news, have conversations with friends, watch videos, check out local events and averagely visit social media platforms up to five times a day.
With that in mind, it’s no wonder why venues and businesses, large and small are taking to social networking sites to meet their customers where they are.
2. Your potential customers use social media to help them make purchases
Other than just browsing and catching up with friends, people use social media to help them make purchasing decisions. Surveys have shown that up to 54% of social browsers use social media to research the products and services they’re interested in, helping them reach the tipping point in making that all-important purchase decision.
3. You can build customer communities
Business profiles on social media allow venues to develop loyal online communities that have the potential to continue to grow in popularity with a reach that is essentially limitless. For example, the likely possibility that a social media user likes your posted content and decides to follow you on social media to keep in touch with what follows.
By offering a simple referral or share to a friend scheme a single user may share your content with five of their friends, three of which decide to also follow your social media profile/page and share with their friends and so on, and so on. You can start to see the powerful momentum and exposure a business or venue can achieve- what starts off as a ripple has the potential to become a powerful social wave.
4. Partnership opportunities
Social media brings the opportunity to collaborate with partners through cross-promotion and provides potential access to an even greater audience than you already have.
When you pick the right partner, the resulting increased venue exposure can mean increased opportunities for bookings and sales as a result of connecting to people looking for services just like yours.
Many of our “enhanced listing” members yield the multiple benefits associated with our social media promotion partnership.
An enhanced listing membership means guaranteed social media promotion on your behalf across four major social media channels at least four times a year, allowing venues to tap into a growing social media following, granting them access to increased members of their key audience, previously unreachable.
Enhanced listings also come with a ton of other benefits, from priority search positioning within our directory, beautiful imagery, maps for venue location and much, much more.
Conclusion
It’s clear to see that social media is here to stay and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, it only continues to grow year on year and become more of an important place for venues and businesses to be.
If you’re not there yet, what are you waiting for? There’s no time like the present to join the social media revolution and start meeting your customers where they are to get the most out of your venue marketing and advertising…
We’ll see you there!
