Facebook Start date: 2010/11

Fans: 136,539 (as of 2016/10/11) URL: www.facebook.com/wtaipei Background:

Facebook is the largest and most influential social media platform in the world so far, with more than 8 billion registered users globally. It’s also the main social platform for brands, media, celebrities and other well-known people to do marketing activities.

Since 2010 W Taipei opened its Facebook Page, it has earned the largest amount of fans in Taiwan’s hotel industry as well as the No.1 in 48 W Hotels & Resorts globally.

Among Starwood Hotels and Resorts’ more-than-one-thousand properties, W Taipei has the second highest fans, just behind Sheraton Macao Hotel’s approximately 186,000 fans. It is given the fact that W Taipei is indeed doing very well on social media marketing and has a bound of loyalty fans on the social media.

Role:

Just like most of the brands in today’s world, W Taipei uses Facebook as its most information social media and its information hub to deliver and share all its latest promotions, offers and information to public. Therefore, all its Facebook posts are written bilingually in Traditional Chinese and English to serve both domestic and international guests.

Post Frequency:

W Taipei arranges at least one post per day and maximum to two posts per day. Based on the research conducted by Buddy Media, one or two brand posts receive 32% higher

“like” rates and 73% comment rates compared to posting 3 or moretimes a day⁴⁶. (See the figure below) By this daily post frequency, W Taipei could gain the minimum social media exposures while not disturbing fans’ user experience. W Taipei always confirm its Facebook post schedule and the contents on week ahead.

Figure 5.1 Research of Facebook Post Frequency Source: Buddy Media

Strategy of Content Management:

W Taipei’s posts contains below nine dimensions, and with its all-included strategy, W Taipei’s Facebook page becomes one of the most popular and highest engagement rate Facebook page in Taiwan’s hospitality industry.

a. Promotional Individual Post

W Taipei’s business is divided by two parts: Rooms and B&F (beverage and food). Business under rooms is also including its spa (AWAY SPA) and fitness center (FIT gym) revenue. On the other hand, B&F-related businesses includes two

restaurants (the kitchen table restaurant & YEN Chinese Restaurant) and three Bars (WOOBAR, WET Bar & YEN Bar) in the property. Generally speaking, most of the posts on Facebook pages belong to this category, that is, with no correlations between each post. See examples below.

Figure 5.2 Example of Room offer post Source: W Taipei’s Facebook page

Figure 5.3 Example of B&F offer post

b. Promotional Themed Series Posts

A series posts in the same theme reflects how serious a social media marketer takes on its social media and his/her mindset to build his/her page in consistency. It can also provide a continuous feeling for the fans while reading the series posts on the page constantly. W Taipei creates two long-term series since 2013, which is “I Love TKT (the kitchen table)” and “I Love YEN”, to market its buffet restaurant and the fine dining restaurant by attaching the “I Love TKT/YEN” logo on the picture and sort them into one album for easily sourcing.

Figure 5.4 One of I Love TKT Series posts

On the other hand, as a strategy to respond the competition in Taipei city after its five-year-opening, from 2016, W Taipei launched a new series campaign called

“You Think You Have Known W Taipei” on Facebook, selecting twelve in-house installation designs and introducing one by one in a weekly basis, as a “Brand

Rejuvenation” campaign for not only refreshing old fans’ memory but introducing W

Taipei beautiful interior designs to new fan. End up this campaign is aiming to re-attract fans and end users to come to the hotel for staying or dining and then to experience the uniqueness of the hotel in an indirect way.

Figure 5.5 One of “You Think You Know W Taipei” series posts

c. Non-Promotional Posts - W’s Four Passion Points

Each brand has its brand character and USP (unique selling points). W Taipei thinks Facebook page is a channel not only for sharing its business offers and

promotions but also a portal to share other information that is related to its brand character and to differentiate its page from its competitors.

Music, fashion, design and fuel and W’s four passion points and the lifestyle what W the brand is advocating of. Therefore, how to utilize these passion points is the key to drive the engagement with fans on Social Media. Not only things that happened in the property could be shared on W Taipei’s Facebook page, but news related to W’s passion point in Taipei/Taiwan would be the materials to be chosen as the contents to be shared.

Figure 5.6 Example of passion points post

d. Non-Promotional Posts - W Insider Tips of Taipei

As mentioned in the previous chapter, W Insider is a unique role in W Hotels that aims to introduce the latest happenings and hot spots in the city of the property located, to differentiate and distinguish the value from other local competitors. Only of W Insider’s job it to issue monthly “Cool Hunter” flyers, which are placed in all W Taipei’s guestrooms from the beginning of each month, introducing the latest

restaurants, attractions and spots that must visit and must-do's in Taipei for all visitors. This is also one of the strategy to keep W Brand fresh and young and connecting to the city.

On Facebook, each week W Taipei features one spot, sourced from “Cool Hunter” as W Insider’s recommendation and travel tips, to promote not only W Insider, strengthen the mindset that W Taipei is always bringing the latest local cool news towards guests, but also to promote Taipei as an attractive and energetic destination for overseas guests to visit.

e. Non-Promotional Posts - W Music Curator’s Tips

“Music Curator” is one of W Hotels’ unique position, who is responsible to the music styling and sourcing in the property. Music Curator is also the key role for the property to connect itself with local DJ community. As for the monthly DJ Parties at WOOBAR is one of the most important revenue resource for W Taipei, to establish the professionalism and knowledge regarding to EDM (Electronic Dance Music) and to develop a good taste on the social media towards local party-goers became another crucial task for W Taipei’s social media strategy.

Every two weeks, W Taipei arranges one post relates to the following topics:

popular music remix, up-coming DJ party introduction or the brief of the latest music style on Facebook as W Taipei Music Curator’s recommendation, to build up the loyalty of local EDM-lovers towards W Taipei.

Figure 5.8 Example of W Music Curator’s Tips

f. Non-Promotional Mood Photo

Non-promotional and non-commercial posts usually generate higher engagements (i.e. results more likes, comments, shares and/or clicks). W Taipei selects UGC (user generated content) through social media platforms such as

Facebook and Instagram and scheduled to W Taipei’s Facebook page after receiving the owners’ consents. W Taipei usually post mood photos on Friday, Saturday and Sunday as its fans are more into soft contents in the weekends.

Mood pictures are including the following scenes: Taipei 101, W Taipei’s WET swimming pool, W Taipei’s rooms, in house installation arts and other public areas, cuisines, cocktails and celebrities/public figures who stayed or visited W Taipei.

Figure 5.9 Example of mood photo post

g. Cross Promotion - Starwood or SPG-related Offers

As an international brand hotel, W Taipei benefits from its mother group’s international exposure and worldwide marketing campaigns, such as discounted offers like Red Hot Deal or Hot Escape and/or points offers like SPG Twice as Nice or SPG Triple Up. During the campaign period, W Taipei arranges one or two posts to encourage it fans to participate and then to enlarge its revenue.

Figure 5.10 Example of SPG offer post

h. Cross Promotion - Sister Properties

As Facebook page is becoming the mainstream and the must-use tool for all hotels globally, it is beneficial to work with overseas sister properties to gain fans and business each other by sharing post or holding cross-property campaigns with feeder markets’, such as W Hong Kong, W Singapore, W Seoul and W Bangkok. For Japan market, since there is not yet a W Hotel opened, W Taipei works with Westin Tokyo or Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay Hotel who’s under Starwood Hotels and Resorts Group.

On the other hand, for properties that are not active on Facebook but WeChat, for example Chinese properties like W Beijing and W Guangzhou, or Instagram, for example island resorts like W Maldives and W Bali, W Taipei usually uses its Facebook page to exchange for the post on those properties’ WeChat or Instagram official account to maximize each property’s social media exposure.

Figure 5.11 Cross-property promotion post with W Hong Kong

i. CSR

As the leading hotel in Taiwan, W Taipei also takes CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) seriously, as it believes a successful brand should stand on a specific point of view firmly to speak for something. This concept is also aligning with its global branding, as W Hotels Worldwide is a long-term advocator of the equal rights for LGBT community.

Besides equal rights, W Taipei also constantly holds charity events such as “A Time for Yoga" event (see below example) that all admission fee will be donated to a non-profit organization after deducting the necessary cost.

Figure 5.12 Example of CSR event post

Output:

Two dimensions will be analyzed for reviewing the performance of W Taipei’s Facebook page management. The first dimension is to compare the diversity of the posts with W Taipei’s local competitors. The second part is to compare W Taipei fan page’s monthly engagement rate and the average engagement rate among all Facebook pages. Due to the confidential concern, the actual result on how Facebook page benefits the business will not be revealed in this case study.

a. Comparison of Diversity

Facebook’s organic reach has drastically declined since 2014.⁴⁷ When reach declines, the difficulty to get fans to engage on Facebook Page increases. Engagement is determined while fans seeing the posts and taking actions (like, comment, share and/or click the post). According to Facebook’s algorithms, when a Facebook page’s engagement is high, Facebook puts its posts out into the news feed more often and vice versa. Low engagement means less people are interested in the posts, and then caused the low reach of the posts as the result. The effect becomes a vicious circle and leads that specific page less and less likely to be seen by its fans.

One of the effective way to avoid the vicious circle mentioned in the previous paragraph is to shift the way of viewing Facebook by increasing the diversity of the posts. When a Facebook page administrator increases the engagement by creating posts that get more engagement, the chance for the brand to successfully promote and sell on Facebook organically increases at the same time. Meaning, the more posts created that elicit actions (more likes, comments, shares and/or clicks), the higher

possibility that specific Facebook page’s posts are shown on its fans’ news feed organically. The higher organic reach a Facebook page could make, the lower marketing budget is needed to be allocated for the advertisement and then the higher managing efficiency is achieved.

It is a common sense that posts that are promotional or selling something won’t get much engagement⁴⁸. However, if people make an effort to build up the engagement and reach with the non-promotional posts, when doing promotional posts, those posts would get a free ride into the news feed, based on Facebook’s algorithm.

In the table below, the diversity of the posts from July to August 2016 of the top 3 Taipei international five-star hotel’s Facebook page (based on the fan base) is compared. The main reason that the time period is chosen is because July and August is the highest season for leisure guests in hotel industry every year, thanks to the summer vacation. Lots of domestic traveler from Central and Southern Taiwan as well as overseas Taiwanese visit Taipei and lead the city-wide hotel room demand strong. On the other hand, the F&B revenue is also highly contributed by the visitors mentioned above, plus local students who are enjoying their summer vacations. In other words, hotels tend to plan lots of promotions during this time period to achieved higher sales revenue and makes the amount of the Facebook page posts larger than any other time in a year.

Table 5.1 Diversity of W Taipei, Regent Taipei and Shangri-La Taipei’s Facebook Page Time period: July to August 2016

W Taipei Regent Taipei Shangri-La Taipei

# Percentage # Percentage # Percentage

Source: Facebook, collated by Julian Lin

As we can see, W Taipei’s Facebook page created the most non-promotional posts (37%) in the selected time period, follow by Regent Taipei’s 22% and Shangri-La Taipei’s 18%. By the theory indicated in the previous paragraphs, by knowing the percentage between the promotional and non-promotional posts in a Facebook page, this is an efficient way to evaluate the engagement of these three Facebook page without getting the actual figure.

Even in the promotional post category, W Taipei still arranged much more

Shangri-La Taipei’s 11%. This fact to be considered that the strategy W Taipei’s social media marketing on Facebook page is comparatively systematic and conscientious than its two local competitors.

b. Comparison of Engagement Rate

In regard of engagement, comparing the monthly engagement of W Taipei’s Facebook page with the average from September 2015 to August 2016, W Taipei surpassed the average of all Facebook pages from 5% to 9%, indicating the content provided by W Taipei is exactly well-received by its fans.

Table 5.2 Facebook Page Monthly Engagement Rate Time period: September 2015 to August 2016

W Taipei Average

Source: Facebook & Locowise, collated by Julian Lin

Limitation:

Although Facebook is the most popular social media so far, due to it constantly changes its algorithm that makes brands’ posts are more and more difficult to be displayed on its followers’ news feed organically. That means, the brands need to place its marketing budget to boost their Facebook posts to ensure the exposures are as much as past times. As the result, in many marketers’ Facebook is no longer an “Earned Media” but rather a “Paid Media” which is highly raised the cost to manage a Facebook page.

At this moment, there is yet no social media could replace Facebook’s primary position for social media marketing, yet it is precisely crucial for brands to consider and develop other social media platforms with lower maintenance cost as the secondary channels to deliver its offers and other intangible brand values in a more efficient way.

5.1.2 LINE@ Official Account