How booking.com is managing brand sentiment in 10 easy steps

Step 1: What is the business goal?

Like all travel businesses, Booking.com needs to secure bookings from those hoping to travel overseas or close to home in the distant future.

Track your own business goals in the Maybe* platform.

 

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A post shared by Booking.com (@bookingcom)

Step 2: Telling the Booking.com story

While travel is still grounded, the business needs to keep inspiring and creating a sense of wanderlust to keep travellers engaged.

As a leader in the travel sector, Booking.com is using this time to lend its expertise to thought leadership content; share the winners of its awards and invite conversation and feedback from its community.

This technique is all about creating hope and anticipation. Do this with your own content. It creates a feel good factor and generates positive engagement from people who want to dream about something to look forwards to.

Step 3: What does Booking.com want its audience to do?

With international travel a distant memory, and still no guarantees for our summer holidays this year, Booking.com wants customers to be inspired to travel locally and engage with its #explorenextdoor campaign. This is a fantastic opportunity for customers and businesses to share what they love about their local place to attract tourism and business, when the time comes.

You can mimic this approach yourself by adding this hashtag to your own content alongside the #supportlocal and #shoplocal tags.

 

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The Maybe* What’s Being Said report for Booking.com showing the content created by Booking.com 

Step 4: How does Booking.com engage with customers?

The business wants people to still share their love of travel. So it is actively asking customers to write love letters to the cities and places they miss. This is a great example of a brand taking user content and then re-sharing it across their own feeds.

Maybe* dedicates a whole section of the dashboard for you to respond to customer messages and engage with their content. This feature is excellent for managing brand sentiment. You’ll find it on the right of your Maybe* dashboard.

 

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The Maybe* dashboard view showing Booking.com comments and mentions they need to respond to

Step 5: Who does Booking.com want to engage?

Booking.com's customers are likely to span many demographics and in several different countries so they aim to reach a wide audience.

The travel sector is ripe for influencer partnerships, or identifying envy-evoking content from the well travelled. The Maybe* Who’s Got Influence report shows who is creating content about Booking.com, but it can also be used to identify influencers in a certain conversation, for example, the #explorenextdoor conversation.

You can replicate this by building relationships with influencers in your sector or finding content to share on your own channels via Maybe*.

The Maybe* Who's Got Influence report showing the conversation influencers creating the most content about Booking.com in February