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The Ellenborough Park Hotel is a luxury hotel in Cheltenham…in the gorgeous Cotswolds.
Unfortunately, because of the work that I do – the first thing that I do when shopping around for places to stay, is go and look at their social media!
As luck would have it – in this case…Ellenborough Park are BRILLIANT at their social media – both in strategy and in implementation. These two things do not always go together I assure you.
What do I like about their social media?
While they have quite an extensive presence on many platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and are blogging) – they are very good on all of them. This isn’t always true for businesses that choose to be on a number of platforms.
For their industry – they are matching what other hotels or “experience-based” locations are doing in terms of platforms. I always advise three things to business in this regard:
- Check where your audiences are hanging out (and BE there)
- Check where your competitors are spreading their wings (in case you should too)
- Make sure you put the commitment in when you choose another platform (each one creates work in itself)
Ben Butler, the Marketing Assistant at Ellenborough Park Hotel was kind enough to chat to me a bit about what happens behind the scenes – so I have added his insights below as well for you. So, down to the nitty gritty on each of the platforms that Ellenborough Park are on:
Facebook | 3194 likers & 5297 check-ins
They are very active on their Facebook page – posting around 5 to 7 posts per week – depending on the activities they have going on. They definitely get traction on the majority of their content – people are communicating with them (through taking actions: “likes”; “comments”; and “shares”). Ben says that they achieve a natural organic reach (without boosting) of around 3,834 per week and with boosting, they average a paid reach of around 10,054 per week. They don’t always boost – only selected content (which is what you should be doing).
They have guests posting on their Timeline – to ask questions and give testimonials and the team are responding in good time, so – great customer experience (and therefore service!) Guests are also mentioning them in their own posts to their friends (which is great that we can now see that again in “Posts to Page” section!)
Twitter | 5215 followers
Beautiful High Tea at the @EllenboroughPk in Cheltenham pic.twitter.com/sqiONW9zUe
— Dorenda Swartjes (@Dorenda_S) February 21, 2015
I have fallen back in love with Twitter lately (I think I got a wee bit underwhelmed when the number of users got so huge – I felt the voice of people were lost – but alas, I was wrong!) Ellenborough Park have a good ratio of tweets (approx 4000) to followers (5215) for the length of time they have been on Twitter. They have a lovely cover image (at the time of writing) – attracting me instantly. They are very good at tweeting relevant content – they are not taking the same piece of content and sharing it exactly the same across all platforms (yay!) They are highly responsive to people who are mentioning or talking to them (see lovely friendly tweet above from a visitor). From what I can see, their content is getting retweeted, and favourited as well, so they have got a very active Twitter following, which must be very rewarding. In fact Ben, from Ellenborough Park, has said to me that Twitter has to be his favourite of all the platforms in terms of getting instant results (i.e. interaction, increase in enquiries, increase in bookings, feedback, etc).
Instagram | 189 followers
Have you stayed with us yet? Call now and check our Autumn breaks. A photo posted by Ellenborough Park (@ellenboroughpk) on
Instagram is a tricky one right? You are fairly limited to mobile use of the platform, unless you invest in a separate tool to manage it. But, this is a massively growing platform and the moment it has more members (300 million) than Twitter, and there are 70 million pictures and videos being shared daily.
I think the magic with Instagram is to really throw it to your followers to be sharing pictures about you. Ellenborough Park do have this happening (if you look on your mobile app). They do share their own beautiful images of the hotel – although not frequently. I suspect that this may be because they aren’t sure what else to post – it can be tricky! But if you searched the hotel in terms of its hashtags, you’ll find that people are actually sharing images of the hotel quite a bit. Ben says that they are about to run a campaign to homogenise the hashtags used across platforms – so this may become easier to monitor.
Pinterest | 254 followers, 18 boards & 345 Pins
They have a nice variety of boards, a lot of local news and experiences that would be interesting to their guests and/or visitors. They also have enough PINs about them as a hotel and the services that they offer (important!) Of course – being a wedding venue is a big item for Pinterest which they are leveraging well. The devil is in the detail for Pinterest seekers – so by zooming in on specific details about weddings, décor etc – will work really well.
I guess the trick is then to work out how to drive that interest back to the hotel and measuring the impact on whether or not that increases wedding enquiries.
They are lucky in terms of location because they have some high-ticket events like the Cheltenham Races – so they can also tap into the sport and the lifestyle around those kinds of events. They have really positioned their boards to be quite relevant to anybody who actually wants to stay at the hotel, and also if anybody is searching for some beautiful Cotswold pictures, they will find them as well. Great job.
Blog
Looking at their blog, they are pretty good at staying on top of current events, so that’s quite important to their local community (or indeed the people that come to the hotel). For example they held a charity dinner at the time of the Six Nations rugby- which was good to do across social media (hang on the back of natural organic chatter on Twitter. I see that they also had their Chef do some cooking tips for Christmas – this is great stuff – even better if done more often (because it would post well on Pinterest – especially with some great images of “how to” in them).
To be fair, they could probably be blogging a bit more frequently, because they seemed to have slowed down in the new year of 2015, but at least they are doing it. That’s really great to see. Ben says that they get an average of 550 views of the blog per week – that says to me that they are doing a great job of driving people to the blog. I reckon the only thing that is missing – is the ability for people to subscribe to the blog, and giving people the ability to actually share the blog post straight from the post.
In closing
A big thank you to Ben Butler at the Ellenborough Park Hotel for being kind enough to answer a few curious questions for me! Your customer service was even extended to little old me to do this post about your lovely hotel. I hope to visit it soon now that I have found it!
In summary: Ellenborough Park Hotel have managed to translate their service and USP’s succinctly across their digital properties. They use clear, professional images to tell a story beautifully and are respectful of their individual audiences across all social media platforms. There is also a great flow between website and social – key in the digital age.
Have you stayed at the Ellenborough Park Hotel? I’d love to hear your experiences below. OR – Have you stayed at a hotel that was superb at its social media – let me know!
