Basic YouTube Guidelines for Hotels

This is an excerpt of our free 2015 Social Media Action Plan for Hoteliers.

YouTube is an excellent way to give your hotel increased exposure through SEO, as it adds high search-ranking video content to your search strategy effort. This is a huge opportunity for hoteliers, because guest engagement with video content is very high: 97% of travelers who watch online video did so within the last month, according to Google’s 2014 Traveler Study. Here are a few things to consider when building your hotel’s page on YouTube:

Use your Google+ page to create your account

If you already have a Google+ Business Page set up, be sure you’re logged in to the correct Google+ account before you navigate to YouTube.

Make content, not ads

You will notice very quickly that traditional types of advertising do not work on YouTube. Even company introductions or product demo videos don’t perform well unless they are done in a creative and engaging way. When creating video content, spend some time thinking about why and how your followers will share your content. This shareability factor is just as important as your idea and the execution of it in video form.

Become the face of your hotel

YouTube is a community made of real people and they want to see, hear, and interact with other real people. The connection to your business becomes much more powerful if you or someone in your organization becomes the face of your brand. It changes the dynamic of the interaction from looking at videos from yet another company to building a relationship with a human. Relationship building becomes a long term strategy that can create loyal guests.

Leverage YouTube videos for SEO

YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google, and the two play really nicely together. In fact, it seems (although Google’s algorithm is top-secret) that a YouTube video with proper use of keywords in the title, tags, and description has an easier time ranking high in search. Your YouTube listing will also appear with a thumbnail image in Google search, which is eye-catching for someone searching through several results.

This is an excerpt of our free 2015 Social Media Action Plan for Hoteliers.