U.K., LONDON - Melia Hotels International has cemented itself as the most influential hotel network in Spain, with 380 hotels globally and 480 social networks (165 hotels and 15 brands with their own presence). It recently exceeded 6.7 million followers across all channels, representing an increase of 28.4% over 12 months. Much of this has been possible thanks to a recent digital transformation project where it promoted a social media culture and reorganised its social networks in collaboration with Hootsuite.
Social media has become a key pillar of Melia’s digital transformation which covers multiple objectives:
- To improve customer relationships by offering a personalised experience
- Increase brand recognition
- Increase traffic to melia.com
- Empower employees through a social culture and attract new talent
With these objectives in place, Melia launched a project to reorganise its social network structure with the implementation of Hootsuite Enterprise. A platform that, from a single panel, allows the company’s social team to amalgamate and visualise Melia’s entire network of social channels, being able to quickly and easily see all generated content across all hotels and geographies.
The project focused on the content created by its brands and hotels, humanising the messages distributed through corporate channels and focusing on the people behind the brand:
- Clients: Melia wants to take advantage of the authenticity and credibility the consumer voice gives to a brand or product. For this reason, it has implemented a user-generated content management system (Flowics), to be used in its different email marketing, digital marketing or via widgets on its website, enabling users to make reservations with just one click from content created by users.
- Influencers: content generated by influencers has allowed new voices to be incorporated into brand content, achieving greater relevance and authenticity for more specific audiences. The programme is managed through software for identification, analysis and reporting of all activity (Traackr) and has recently been linked to 1.74 million interactions based on 40 activations with influencers exclusively for the ME By Melia brand, a potential reach of 74.7 million users.
- The "Social" CEO: Gabriel Escarrer, Chief Executive Officer of Melia, activated his personal profiles on Twitter and LinkedIn in 2018 to support the company's new social media culture and promote the reputation of the corporate brand. In addition, it encouraged interaction with Melia’s customers through the hashtag #AskCEOMelia, where fans could ask him questions about aspects of the tourism industry directly.
- Employees: Melia has also launched a new programme of internal ambassadors utilising Hootsuite Amplify, which allows the company's employees to access pre-approved content which they can share and customise for their own social channels, helping to humanise the brand. As a result, Melia generated 142 million impressions in 2018 alone.
All these actions have translated into an increase in global visits to the melia.com sales website from social networks, which has risen from 9% in 2017 to 12% in 2018 (in Europe, the percentage rose to 16%).
"The influence of social networks when it comes to the reputation and performance of the business is now unquestionable. Being active in this environment has given us the opportunity to gain a bigger social footprint and better understand our business, our clients and all our stakeholders. We’re strengthening our relationships with them in an authentic and transparent way," says Gabriel Escarrer, CEO of Melia.
Since this programme, Hootsuite has become a valued partner of Melia enabling it to promote its social strategy on a large scale. As explained by Santiago Garcia Solimei, Global Director of Social Media at Melia: "Hootsuite has become a strategic partner of Social Media for us and is the basis of our entire social strategy on this large scale. It has become a 360 solution that facilitates the management of all our networks, both global marketing teams, as well as the operational managers of the hotel itself.