UAE hotels turn to Instagram, social media to carve a niche

Leading UAE hotel chains are turning to Instagram to market their properties visually.

Striking images, such as this one above, when posted on social media including Instagram help marketeers inspire and engage their audience. Sarah Dea / The National

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an Instagram photo is worth a thousand tweets.” This is the view of Philippe Gonzalez, the Madrid-based founder of Instagramers, a community of city-based Instagram groups for the online photo and video-sharing service.

The numbers seem to back his opinion. Launched in October 2010, Instagram now has 200 million monthly active users, with an average of 55 million posts per day and an excess of 20 billion photos shared on the platform to date.

The social media site is also very popular in the UAE – not surprising, since several studies rank the country as having one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world. According to Google, it sits at about 75 per cent.

But the popular app is not only about individuals capturing and sharing moments of their daily lives. Brands, too, are posting photos and videos on the site every day. A few weeks ago, Instagramers launched The Instagram Handbook for Brands, featuring tools and tips to help marketeers inspire and engage their audience on Instagram.

Such advice is particularly helpful for upscale hotels that have an array of eye-catching visual content to share, from lobby and spa interiors to creative menu presentations and more.

Sarah Wisler, a digital marketing manager at Mina Seyahi Complex in Dubai, believes that Instagram is the channel that can really show the “soul” of a brand: “From striking images to behind-the-scenes shots, a hotel’s Instagram feed can enclose every aspect of daily life in a hotel from a guest’s perspective,” she says.

Travel is an occasion when most users engage actively on social networks: before a trip to get inspired, during a trip to stay in touch with friends, and after a trip to reminisce about the happy moments. The use of hashtags and geotags on Instagram makes it easy to search for photos of a specific location. For instance, a hashtag search for #JumeirahBeach will deliver around 17,000 posts, many of which are photos of hotels in the area.

Mr Gonzalez recalls how three years ago, before a trip to Thailand, he browsed Instagram photos of hotels on Phi Phi Island to decide where to stay. He found Instagram to be an easier way to gather information about places to stay than going through holiday catalogues.

As it seems to make business sense for a hotel to showcase its property on a platform that so many people around the world spend a lot of time browsing, virtually every five-star hotel in the UAE has an Instagram account.

Madiha Zakir, cluster e-commerce and social media manager at UAE Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, admits that while Facebook and Twitter still take the lead in terms of engagement for the group's brand, Instagram continues to show a positive growth. "Because visual marketing is one of the big trends for 2014, Instagram is a key tool for us this year," she says.

But does posting hotel photos on Instagram actually lead to people booking more rooms? In other terms, what is a hotel’s return on investment from its Instagram strategy?

While Ms Wisler does not think Instagram will drive many direct conversions in terms of bookings, she does view the platform as an effective window on the hotel that, if well executed, can increase brand awareness. “Guests don’t trust photoshopped images on hotel websites,” she says. “Instagram adds a ‘human touch’, with pictures that are closer to a guest’s experience.”

Ms Zakir echoes the importance of building brand trust: “Customers prefer to buy from businesses they trust and Instagram allows us to build this trust through transparency,” she says. “By visually showing what we do day in and day out, people get to know our brand and begin to have confidence in it.”

In the past few years a few social networks have come and gone. Remember MySpace, for example? So it’s natural to ask if Instagram is not just a passing trend. Although opinions differ, the focus of hotels on visual marketing, at least in the near future, makes Instagram an attractive platform in which to invest their efforts. The challenge in the longer run will be to turn Instagram into a profitable activity.

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