Social Media Case Study: How Sahara Star Converged Guest Experiences with a Dynamic Facebook Cover Photo

Brand Name

Sahara Star

Agency Name

Brandlogist Communications Consultancy 

Introduction

Sahara Star recently reached a benchmark of 1,00,000 fans on Facebook and 1,000 followers on Twitter, which was done by converging guest experiences from across the web onto Facebook via a dynamic cover photo.

Objective

The objective was to celebrate the occasion while continuing to drive increased ROI for the brand via current guests/customers. Sahara Star currently has 23,200 check-ins on Facebook, which is one of the highest in the 5 star category and derives a significant part of its revenue and custom interest from social media. The campaign just extended the ROI via reviews from existing guests.

Execution

One big challenge which any hospitality brand today faces is that, guests are sharing their experiences across the web - tripadvisor, blogs, forums, Twitter etc and as a brand you would want all of these to get aggregated in an interesting way onto your primary platform, which is usually Facebook. These are strong drivers of consumer interest, especially for a luxury brand.

To address this, Brandlogist designed a Facebook cover photo which would be updated with a new user comment from across the web after every like. So, a user may tweet something on Twitter today about the brand, and the people on the Facebook page see his/her experience in their newsfeed via a cover photo.

Feedback from Twitter on Cover Photo

Conversation on from Tripadvisor on the dynamic cover photo

 A dynamic countdown was also included on the cover photo, with every new guest experience on the cover.

Apart from that, Sahara Star ran a contest on Twitter, Instagram and even Facebook under the theme of ‘Star moments’ where the focus was on guests and generating word of mouth publicity through them. On Twitter, the campaign was called #1000Stars where the idea was to crowd source reasons from Twitter followers for being at the hotel. On Facebook, the campaign, which was an app called 'Memorable Moments,' asked fans to share their Star Moments with a picture, background and a few words.

On the concern of negative reviews coming up on the cover photo app, Sahara Star says, "When you are on social media, you are bound to be criticized and it's something we have always dealt by active engagement (picture below). Since there was a potential of us getting spammed, we also had a CMS (Content Management System) to choose the reviews/tweets which appeared, but the agenda was not to block constructive criticism".

Results

The idea behind all of this is to build word of mouth through our guests and relevant fans, and it's a strategy which has worked for them throughout .This campaign itself got a reach of 342.6k with 1.8 million impressions by 770.8k users.

Sahara Star currently has 23,200 check ins on Facebook. Even on Twitter, the brands strategy has never been to follow a lot of people just to get a follow back. Currently the follower-following ratio stands at 12 to 1,096 people, which is great by any standard with a lot of active engagement.