Hotel Marketing on Pinterest (Psst, the Keyword is Interest)

Pinterest was once a social media outlier for businesses, but you’d be wise to keep it in your sights. It’s an indulgent space, where users are following and cultivating their passions—gourmet food and recipes, fast cars, beautiful homes, and luxurious destinations, among other things.

There’s apparently a temptation to simply upload stock hotel photos. Don’t fall prey. (Am I starting to sound like a broken record about this? Good.) As I said in this post about hotels and Facebook, social media is about authenticity, so give users something they can get really excited about. (P.S. This isn’t to say you can’t and shouldn’t carefully select some of your most interesting commercial imagery to post. If any social media site can take it, it’s Pinterest. I see more glossy, well-lit images here than just about anywhere else, since many users are pinning stock photos from websites. I’m just urging caution about making stock photos your strategy.)

So what can you do to keep it interesting? Here are a couple of ideas:

Image concierge: To give credit where it’s due, I first read about this—along with some good statistics—on Hotel Marketer some time ago. I still like the idea. It’s a way to engage users without being so self serving.

Neighbohood expert: Taking the concierge idea one step further, how about giving guests an in-depth look at your neighborhood? Trump Hotels does this for SOHO on their Pinterest page, but it could be done for virtually any city. If you have trouble finding photography, just go out and take some yourself. It’ll probably be more interesting that way.

What do your guests like to do? Four Seasons knows its clientele as you can see from their Fashion Board. Is your market families, artists and writers, business travelers? Consider their interests, then create thematic boards on Pinterest.

Whether you’re just getting your hotel’s Pinterest board going or have had one for a while, you’d be smart to use their new analytics. Here’s a nice demo of how to implement the new Pinterest analytics tool. It starts tracking data once it’s “turned on,” so stop reading and go flip the switch.