Still thinking of Facebook and Twitter as a pastime for people who have nothing better to do than sharing their ups and downs online? These social media websites have started to attract the interest of business, not least in Malta, and in one case in the hospitality industry, it is generating good business indeed.
Le Meridien St Julians Hotel and Spa is one of the pioneering Maltese businesses, especially in the tourism industry, which have understood the power of the reach of social media such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube. It is estimated that there are more than 80,000 Maltese users of Facebook alone.
"We have been using Facebook for the past year-and-a-half after we realised it is a free channel with a large audience," explained Ludivine Bendotti, e-commerce manager at Le Meridien St Julians. "We started with a profile on Facebook and I had to learn from scratch how social media work. At that time there were other Maltese businesses on Facebook but not local hotels."
Starwood Hotels and Resorts WorldWide, operator of the Le Meridien brand, is pushing online social networks and there is a lot of work at corporate level to exploit not just internet but social media in particular on a global scale. In the United States, for example, the hotel chains offer games and applications on Facebook to interact better with their clients.
"Everything is an experiment and I love it! It is growing so fast that you need to keep in the loop. The reach it has is unbelievable. Every company will have to look into it in the future," Ms Bendotti added.
Figures confirm that an online presence makes business sense and internet has an increasingly important role in the profitability of the hotel.
"We estimate that close to one third of our room revenue is generated online and that this year around 23 to 25 per cent of room nights will have been booked online. Two years ago, before a position was created to own the online marketing process, it was less than 15 per cent," revealed the e-commerce manager of Le Meridien St Julians.
Apart from Facebook, Le Meridien St Julians taps into other social networking sites such as Bit.ly, YouTube, Flickr, Parnoramio, Slideshare, Delicious, Qype, Wikitravel and Dailymotion.
Within six months the Maltese hotel's Facebook profile had over 1,000 "friends". But Facebook does not allow businesses to have a profile so the hotel had to set up instead a fan page and in a few weeks time it had over 1,500 fans.
"We realised people wanted to interact with us. They wanted to give feedback and Facebook turned out to be an excellent medium," explained Ms Bendotti. "People use Facebook for enquiries more than e-mail. They use it to get in touch with us before they check in. Clients feel they are getting a personalised service."
The hotel also created an account on Twitter, the micro-blogging service, some time after launching on Facebook and this has garnered around 200 followers.
"We see a different role for these two different social media. We use Twitter more to reach our international corporate and business clients, while we put our last-minute local offers on Facebook."
The Facebook fan page has a picture gallery of the hotel and there are plans to have video content that promotes the cuisine at the hotel. The trick is not to spam followers and put them off with an unrelenting sales pitch.
Le Meridien has enrolled the advice of Travelclick to fine-tune online media solutions. Expenses on the use of social media for marketing will be part of the Maltese hotel's budget for next year, definite proof that there are business benefits. Other social networking websites like TripAdvisor are also monitored and the hotel receives regular reports on users' feedback left on such websites.
Ms Bendotti sees the use of social media as an investment that can give good returns.
"However it is very time consuming! I expect companies that really want to exploit social media to recruit people just to interact with clients."
The rise of online social media for business came at a time when the international economic crisis hit the tourism industry. Le Meridien St Julians had to cut down the expenses on traditional advertising but exploited more online advertising and online social networks which come at a very low cost.
"Online advertising costs less than say print, and is trackable. We know exactly whether the advert is effective or not," revealed Ms Bendotti. "We have made the shift to online campaigns and we use print mainly for brochures. We want to keep a healthy relationship with the local traditional media but today we are convinced that online advertising has a bigger impact for us."
As an example of the effectiveness of online campaigns she referred to the experience last Easter when social media and online advertising were exclusively used to promote the Easter Sunday lunch. The hotel was so swamped with reservation requests that it had to increase substantially the number of tables.