For example, hotels can directly interact with new guests and old, keeping your location in the top of their minds, reminding them of what a great time they had with you, encouraging repeat guest and referrals of new guests. (Verble referrals being very important to hotels).

Gaining a locale following, all hotels have high and low seasons, locals might mean anything from 100 yards to 1000Km, they do use local hotels for meetings, dinning and take short breaks, weekends away etc. and are often asked for advice by friends that visit their area on where to stay and eat. Local guests for example in our case are not affected by political problems, volcanos in Europe etc.
Having a strong local following protects you in slow times and gains you good steady traffic from the referrals locals give you. This is not to be underestimated.
We have learned over the years that financially this is a great tool and thank god has been over looked by the bigger hotel chains up until now.
Direct referrals have another advantage, that is always forgotten by the industry, with its heavy reliance on agent sties to sell rooms for them, is that an agent takes in most case 20% of your room revenue, were direst bookings do not. Add that up over a year how much more could a hotels spend on direct marketing including Facebook and social media.
it does not take much though, to realise that hotels are an integral part of peoples holiday, and big ticket item for most people, they want to share this with friends and family when they return home it does not take much to encourage them to share this with a wider forum and social sites like Facebook are great for this.
Feel free to browse our facebook page and see how much interaction is going on and how much of it is from our guests and not just us pushing us.
Our page for a 40 room resort in the middle of know where on a very small island 60km from the nearest land over 200km from the next big-ish town has now over 20,000 likes and very loyal following and I can’t state enough how it has assisted us in becoming as successful we are.
http://www.facebook.com/castawayresort
I can’t see how this would not be a useful tool to any Hotel of any size, and is truly easy to implement, it just takes a little bit of cash and a little bit of thought.

But thanks for this research, and thanks for some good example of people doing a good job. You rock sir!

1) MGM Grand – 5,000+ rooms: 51K+ FB Friends / 18K+ Twitter Followers. Highly engaged.

2) Wynn Las Vegas – 5,000+ rooms: 9K+ FB Friends / 335K+ Twitter Followers. Interactive conversations.

3) Kimpton Hotels – 55 properties: 14K+ FB Friends / 6.7K Twitter Followers. Social media is extension of customer oriented operations.

4) Joie de Vivre Hotels – 30 properties: 3.9K+ FB Friends / 8K+ Twitter Followers. CEO Chip Connelly is a strong social media supporter. Website also has strong user generated content & customer engagement.

5) Drake Hotel (Toronto) – 18 rooms: 2.5K+ FB Fans / 8K+ Twitter Followers. Proof that you don’t have to be big to have it work (their club also helps a lot.)

(Not nearly as many as there should be…)

I plan on linking to this Friday, and I hope these case studies help people re-think their strategy here.

Cheers
Josiah