Many hotel owners may only be familiar with LinkedIn as a job posting platform as opposed to a place to attract travelers. However, as long as you thoughtfully plan the content you post, LinkedIn is completely viable as a platform to attract business and casual travel.

Like any social media platform, LinkedIn’s algorithm prefers certain types of content. In order to leverage the platform and boost post engagement, page performance, and overall ROI, you need to understand key characteristics of posts that work best.

Images, Images, Images

Social media is highly visual, and almost no post should go without an image. LinkedIn’s business page suggests that collages are also a best practice for businesses using the platform. Posts with 3-4 images tend to perform even better than posts with just one or two.

It’s easy to feel like the images you post need to be directly relevant to your property – exterior and interior photos, amenity highlights, or candid staff photos (posted with proper permission) may be at the top of your mind. However, you can make use of various free online resources to create your own promotional images. Our social media team at Travel Media Group often goes the extra mile to create eye-catching images to share across our hotel partners’ social media platforms.

Natively Uploaded Video

Even if you have the video posted somewhere else, post it on its own to LinkedIn instead of cross-sharing to ensure better performance and higher organic reach. The content of your videos can be anything, from virtual tours of the property to re-uploads of previous live videos you hosted in the past.

Live video is an excellent way to boost engagement online and to further connect with travelers. TMG’s Brand Ambassador Ryan Embree shared in-depth advice for hoteliers seeking to expand their reach online with fun, live video content. Live video affords you the unique opportunity to connect with guests casually before they visit. In the comments, you might respond to messages with “When are you planning on visiting us?” Uploading your past live video to your LinkedIn also ensures that more of your audience will be able to watch it after the fact.

Third-Party Content

As a primarily business-oriented platform, LinkedIn’s users value high-quality industry insights. Collecting your own thoughts and opinions into blog posts or short articles may not be possible to do consistently, which is why thought leaders and content creators often share third-party content. For a hotelier, this can be simple – we post regular blogs and research-heavy white papers as just a fraction of the educational content for our hotel partners to read and share. Beyond us, any insights shared by other hoteliers in LinkedIn groups could easily be cross-shared to your own hotel’s page, as well.

A brief sentence of commentary attached to educational or insightful content serves as a breather for your audience, who is barraged with thousands of marketing messages every day. Even sharing local stories or updates in the area can breathe fresh life onto your LinkedIn profile, opening up further opportunities for connecting with guests and making yourself memorable.

Stories As Text Posts

When it comes to sharing memorable content, there is a piece of social media advice all hoteliers should keep in mind: make sure your business has a story. On LinkedIn, that story can manifest in a number of ways. It can be woven throughout your captions, explained in a video format, or even simply shared as a text post.

This is not an uncommon practice online: many LinkedIn influencers – users with large followings – will post stories about a time in their life they found significant to who they are as a person today. If you have an insightful story about your hotel, your property, or your life as a hotelier, consider sharing it on your page! It will add personality and authenticity to your brand that potential guests will love to read. Authenticity and personality are two things that Gen Z, in particular, looks for when deciding between businesses to support. 

Deciding what content to post to your LinkedIn profile may take some getting used to, especially if you’re not used to the platform. With Travel Media Group’s robust social media solution, we help create and schedule content for all your most important social media profiles – that includes LinkedIn. Our social media solution page has more information about how we help hoteliers take their social media schedule to the next level.