Hospitality concepts have always relied on visual media to help showcase their venues to prospective clients. Social media has taken this relationship a step further by enabling brands to get even closer to their audience. Riky Bains, brand strategist and copywriter at Klinical, shares his thoughts on how hotels and restaurants can leverage Instagram and YouTube to reach more people.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a five-star hotel or an artisanal coffee shop; your audience will always consist of individuals who appreciate certain kinds of content.

Over many years of creating social media content, those of us in the business have realized that these two techniques generate the greatest engagement on Instagram:

User-generated content (UGC)
UGC is about inviting and incentivizing your customers to take photos, videos and get creative. By encouraging them to post their experiences and tag your business, you’re essentially building a network of brand ambassadors who shout about your company on your behalf.

We know from our experience and intuition that UGC directly influences customers’ booking and reservation choices; recent studies confirm this too. Before going ahead with booking a hotel or a restaurant, people check reviews and the Instagram feed to find authentic representations of what awaits them. That’s why it’s important to reward customers for posting about your brand by reposting it on your own Instagram channel and tagging them in it. This awards them with recognition, as well as the feeling that they are truly a respected member of your community.

Interactive posts
Quizzes, games, puzzles and polls are all highly effective ways of creating engagement (likes, comments and follows). However, such posts must be designed in an attractive, aesthetically pleasing and “on-brand” way. It’s not good enough to just post a wordsearch or a spot-the-difference puzzle; there needs to be high-quality design involved in the process, as well as relevance to your brand.

But what about videography? If you’re creating content on YouTube, you should consider the following:

Basics
Lighting, sound, setting and storyboarding are all fundamental contributing factors to the success of a video.

Scriptwork
An experienced copywriter and someone with the right tone of voice needs to make sure your script is impactful and delivers a clear message.

Humanize
Nobody wants to see a lifeless, sanitized shot of your hotel or restaurant. Your audience wants to watch a charismatic person guide them around your establishment.

Editing
Don’t overedit with aftereffects, as it will take away from the authenticity of the video. A growing trend now is the desire for natural, stripped-back content.

Text
It’s always a good idea to create subtitles for those watching without sound. This simple technique will increase viewership dramatically.

Repurposing
Chop up long videos into smaller chunks that can be published on different platforms. This is how to create several pieces of content from a single item, thereby reaching a wider audience.