Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Toronto, won the 2012 Social Hotel Award for best Facebook page, brand. To see all the Social Hotel Award winners, click here to go to the winners index or click here to read about them in the September digital edition of HOTELS Magazine.
Four Seasons launched its Facebook presence in May 2009. The corporate team trained public relations directors and social media specialists across the globe to launch their own presence on social media and create share-worthy content to engage with consumers — Four Seasons says its social marketing team includes 80 personnel. Training includes how to incorporate Facebook into existing marketing plans, how to respond to customer inquiries and how to participate in Facebook chats.
Facebook photo albums and applications are introduced for specific campaigns, and a tab was created to drive e-commerce efforts with the goal of nurturing deeper engagement with the Facebook community. It also focuses on qualitative measures like 24/7 monitoring for rapid response time, posting frequency, content structure and the development of quality imagery and media.
Four Seasons’ target audience is men and women in their early 40s to late 50s with US$500,000 in median household income.
In Q2 2012, fan engagement on Facebook was up 42%. Of existing Four Seasons social platforms, Facebook is the number one referral source for visits to Four Seasons websites.