Tips The opportunities created by knowing who @johndoe is in your database.

We build a lot of new things at Inntopia. New features, new tools, new campaigns. Every once in a while I get so excited about the constant flow of new features, I lose track of my favorites. The ones that are my go-to source of success. It’s like when your lucky t-shirt gets buried in the closet. Then, voilà, you find it again and remember how much you love it. That’s exactly how I feel about an Inntopia Marketing Cloud feature called social media matching. It’s been around for nearly 6 years, but last week I was again reminded of how useful and powerful it can be.

Joe Doe vs @JohnDoe

Social media matching is just like it sounds. We use the information we have about someone in the database to match them to their profiles on social media. Our first attempts were not exactly successful. But eventually we found better and better ways to increase our match rate and now have have profiles for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a dozen other sites all available right from each guest’s profile in Inntopia Marketing Cloud.

As the years have gone on, this single feature has opened up more cool possibilities than almost any other I’ve seen. So while we’ve released dozens of new features since then, there are three simple reasons this remains one of my favorites.

1) Truly Informed Social Engagement
First and foremost, it enables you to have truly informed interactions with people on social media. I talked about this recently, but knowing who is a VIP and who is just a random troll can make a huge difference when someone on your team hits “reply” to that mention on Twitter or comment on Facebook.

2) Identifying Influencers within Your Database
Instead of relying solely on follower count, social matching allows marketers to identify guests who are both loyal to the resort and influential on social media. They may not have 100,000 followers, but their 1,000 or 10,000 followers combined with $10,000 in lifetime spend make them a perfect candidate to work with.

3) Email-to-Social Promotions
It’s funny, some people predicted social media would kill email. But when you look at how social grew so quickly, you’ll find billions upon billions of emails sent each day by the likes of Facebook and Twitter to get users back onto their sites. Likewise, one of the fastest ways to grow your own social following is via email. Maybe hundreds of emails instead of billions, but using social data to target these promotions makes them incredibly effective.

Not New, Just Awesome

Social media matching may not be new to Inntopia Marketing Cloud, but I love how its potential continues to evolve. We couldn’t foresee the ways we’d be using it today when we originally built it, and I’d imagine we’ll have even more novel ways to put it to use in the days ahead.

If you use Inntopia Marketing Cloud, log into your account and visit any guest’s profile to see it in action. If you aren’t yet a user, get in touch. We’d love to show you around.