Hotel social media marketing: What are the top tools hotels use to manage their accounts?

photo of the author Gregg Blanchard

There are quite literally thousands of tools available to help brands manage and analyze their social media accounts. But which ones are hotels and resorts using? Which of these platforms are the ones hospitality marketers rely on the most to get the full value possible from their efforts? That was our question, here’s our answer.

The Goods
Compared to other sites where the vast majority of content is shared natively, nearly half of all tweets posted by hotels and resorts come from a 3rd party tool. So for this analysis we used Twitter’s “source” identifier from over 225,000 tweets posted by 4,900 hotels and resorts during the last year. We excluded cross-sharing between networks (i.e., where the source was “Facebook”, “Instagram”, etc.) and looked only at the tools brands use outside of these networks.

Here are the top 25 with the total number of brands from our sample that are using that specific platform followed by the percentage of the total that represents in parenthesis.

Tool/ Platform	Hotels/Resorts (% of total)
1 Hootsuite	707 (14.4%)
2 Sprout Social	271 (5.5%)
3 TweetDeck	220 (4.5%)
4 Constant Contact	67 (1.4%)
5 Revinate	60 (1.2%)
6 Buffer	58 (1.2%)
7 BCV	51 (1.0%)
8 MediaConnect360	45 (0.9%)
9 Sprinklr	42 (0.9%)
10 MailChimp	35 (0.7%)
11 Spredfast App	35 (0.7%)
12 Sysomos Expion	34 (0.7%)
13 Engage121	33 (0.7%)
14 IFTTT	32 (0.7%)
15 Falcon	31 (0.6%)
16 TwitterFeed	22 (0.5%)
17 Flip.to	19 (0.4%)
18 Desk.com	18 (0.4%)
19 Meet Edgar	15 (0.3%)
20 Paper.li	14 (0.3%)
21 Radian6	13 (0.3%)
22 Twuffer	12 (0.2%)
23 Raven Tools	11 (0.2%)
24 Echofon	10 (0.2%)
25 Sendible	9 (0.2%)

As a comparison, 37% of all brands used the Twitter web client, 21% used Twitter’s iPhone app, and 5% used Twitter’s Android app to post content to their Twitter account.

What This Means
What surprised us the most was the sheer number of these platforms. From our sample of 4,900 properties, we found tweets posted from over 210 different tools.

Hopefully this list not only sparks some ideas, but does so in a way that adds a little bit of the social proof and weight to the feature lists and testimonials these tools use to get you intrigued by the possibilities.

Next Week, More
We’ve been publishing new resort- and hotel-specific insights like this one every week since 2012. Don’t want to miss the next round? Stick your email below.