Social sentiment is a powerful tool for all brands, but especially for those in industries like Travel & Hospitality, where peer recommendations are so high. Here’s what we learned in compiling our latest industry report.
Travel & Hospitality by the Numbers
The NetBase Industry Report 2018: Travel & Hospitality is an analysis of brand conversations across the social web – inclusive of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, review sites, blogs, forums and news sites worldwide – from July 1, 2017 through July 1, 2018.
It encompasses an exploration of top trends and overall performance of an assortment of 60 brands across five categories including, Airlines, Car Rental Companies, Cruise Lines, Hotels, and Travel Sites.
Here are some quick stats:
- Mentions: 78+ Million
- Net Sentiment: 54%
- Reach: 1.5 Trillion
- Awareness: 1.1 Trillion
- Largest share of list: Airlines and Hotels, 25% each
- Largest share of voice: Airlines (58%) and Hotels (25%)
Given the impressive mentions, reach and awareness, how excited should Airline and Hotel brands be? As always, we need Sentiment Analysis to clarify what’s driving that engagement. Here’s a look at Brand Passion for each category:
Brand Passion Index
Brand Passion is the weighted result of combining Net Sentiment (whether emotions are positive or negative on a scale from -100 to +100) and Passion Intensity (the strength of those emotions on a scale from -100 to +100).
A high Brand Passion score – Cruise Lines, for example – indicates a passionately positive fan base. A low Brand Passion score indicates passionate negative opinions from your customers/audience.
Beyond Keywords to Identifying Themes
Looking at individual Net Sentiment and Passion Intensity for your brand helps you better understand the overall social sentiment of your fan base. This is especially true when you explore not just keywords, but themes.
Here’s a comparison of the 15 brands sharing space in our Top 10 (there were a few ties), and how they rate across some common themes:
While several of the Airline and Hotel brands in the Top 10 – along with the outliers of Airbnb and Royal Caribbean Cruises – get high marks for Adventure Travel, there are some opportunities to be had in other areas.
Both Sales/Discounts and Customer Service have room for growth in roughly half of the brands represented – and these are the best of the 60 analyzed.
This is important information on two fronts:
- It’s helpful to know when travelers really love one aspect of your brand, but wish you’d step it up in another. It tells you where to focus to generate a better customer experience overall.
- This type of competitor analysis is invaluable for understanding where you’re ahead of competing brands, and where you’re dropping the ball.
Channels, Content, Partnerships, and More
As important as understanding where you fit in the landscape is knowing where these important conversations are taking place. That way you can be part of the discussion, and use the insights gained to improve brand offerings.
We found Twitter to be an important channel for most of our categories, with the exception of Travel Sites. Most of those conversations happen off of Twitter – but don’t eliminate the little blue bird too quickly if you’re in the Travel Sites category.
Though forums and Instagram have higher conversation volumes, Twitter is still a good place to share information, as the hashtag #ExpediaChat – the travel aggregator brand’s top hashtag – proves.
You need to use social analytics tools to find the perfect balance of channels and content for your brand. Industry and category trends matter, of course, but individual brands break the mold all the time. Be sure you know what your audience wants.
Meanwhile, if you’re not getting the share of voice you’d like, consider partnering with another brand to raise your profile.
This is a route Car Rental brands could consider. This category accounted for only 1% of the conversation volume in our report, with the lowest Net Sentiment and Brand Passion scores, on average, as well.
This might mean the focus of social conversations in the Car Rental category are transactional or customer service oriented. These brands should work toward creating exciting content that highlights what they offer – or perhaps join forces with brands in other categories.
Where Do You Stand?
These are just some of the highlights included in the NetBase Industry Report 2018: Travel & Hospitality. There’s so much to discover in the full report, like:
- Which category has the most passionate audience?
- When do conversations about vacations peak?
- What are the most popular summer vacation hashtags?
- Which brand campaigns killed it over the past year?
And more! To find out where your brand and/or competitors rank, or simply to learn from examples of a booming industry, download the complete report today.
Want to learn more about the tools we used to compile this report? Get in touch and we’ll show you how to run the same analytics for your own brand!
RELATED ARTICLES
- How To Use Lesser Known Holidays To Generate Social Love
- Social Analytics Strategy: The Best Practices Of The World’s Most-Loved Brands
