Interview: Fairmont Hotels Explains Their Twitter Strategy. By Josiah Mackenzie Thursday, 5th November 2009

Last week I caught up with Fairmont’s Public Relations manager, Mike Taylor, to discuss how Fairmont uses Twitter to communicate with their community.

Josiah: What’s your overall goal or strategy for Twitter?

Mike: On Twitter it’s about two things: developing awareness and understanding of what our brand is and what we represent. The second part of it is the engagement factor. We are interested in having a dialogue with the people that follow us — be it guests, media, travel planners, travel agents — we have a wide variety of people that follow us. So I tried to drill down and have a dialogue with all of these individuals that want to know more about us and want to speak with us.

The type of content do you try to share through Twitter?

Again, it’s a wide variety. We push out news and information; we think that’s valuable. We include package and rate offers. We don’t see Twitter primarily as a distribution tool. But if we have something that’s a great deal we’re going to let people know about it.

We are really trying to provide “behind the curtain” type of insider details that you may not know about either.

And we’ve also created specific hash tags that are audience specific. So we have one for our environmental news, and another for our travel agents when we’re speaking to that community. So we’re trying to use hash takes to funnel information down to a very specific focus and reach a certain audience.

Do you publish all of this yourself? I know you have hotels around the world — how do you work with individual properties — and how do you manage all of that?

At a brand level, I am the guy that does it all! I’m coming up with content — I don’t want to say we develop a publishing calendar, because that seems much too formal — but I definitely have information that isn’t time sensitive. That will be sitting at the ready for when there may not be much to talk about. I would say a high percentage of our content is either things that land on my desk that day, or else a result of what someone else has posted.

So at a brand level, I would say I’m the person that is responsible for all the content. But we definitely do have a number of our hotels at local levels that have Twitter pages. Their focus really tends to be on a local or regional market, trying to develop a presence there. They’re posting more on things that would be of interest to that local market. For example, maybe there’s a drink special at one of the properties they want to promote. So the content is a little more focused on the local, regional market.

I would probably say we have about half of our hotels on Twitter. The rest just leverage our brand level account.

How do you gain followers? You currently have around 6,000 people receiving your updates…

Our focus really isn’t on follower count. It’s certainly one metric we look at, but that’s not where our focus is. I don’t just randomly follow back anyone who follows us. We really try to follow people that are influencers, people that are interested — genuinely interested — in our brand and that we want to have discussion with. And of course we follow media.

But we definitely don’t just go out and start randomly following as many people as we can…just to bump that number up. That’s not natural, and that’s not why we’re on there.

Finally, give us a success story — what’s the best thing that’s happened as a result of your participation on Twitter?

Narrowing it down to one is a pretty big challenge! There’s been a few things. Twitter has introduced us to people we otherwise wouldn’t have a relationship with. So it’s sort of that global neighborhood concept where these people wouldn’t have reached out to us or vice versa if we were not participating. We wouldn’t have been able to develop relationships with other brands and other individuals which have been very beneficial for us.

We’ve had a lot of fun, but that’s a hard question to answer — there has been so much value we have received.

You can follow Mike’s updates for Fairmont @FairmontHotels

Original article: www.hotelmarketingstrategies.com/fairmont-hotels-twitter

About the author
This blog is written by Josiah Mackenzie, who enjoys exploring the relationship between emerging technology and the hospitality industry. 

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