Dive Brief:
- Travelers looking to stay in two Paris hotels in Starwood’s Tribute Portfolio brand can now book a room simply by tapping on Instagram photos, according to a Digiday report.
- The hotelier is working with LikeToKnow.it, a shopping platform, to offer hotel booking via Instagram in a process that requires travelers to tap on an Instagram photo and then complete the booking via an email automatically generated by the tap.
- Given some of Instagram’s inherent limitations such as no clickable links within posts, giving followers a way to book hotel rooms from within the platform is a creative workaround by the marketing team.
Dive Insight:
“Considering our target audience of socially connected independent-minded travelers and that we are a new brand of independent hotels, social media is very important for us,” Dave Marr, global brand leader for Tribute Portfolio, told Digiday.
Instagram has been making changes to the platform, such as allowing all users to post videos up to 60-seconds long, that align its capabilities more with parent-company Facebook and that also give brand marketers more playing room in terms of the creatives they post to the app.
The biggest soon-to-be change is that users’ timelines will no longer be strictly chronological and will instead be based on an algorithm to highlight posts that are likely to be interesting for users. Marketers have expressed concerns that the change will hurt organic traffic and will require more paid posts to make sure followers see the content, similar to how marketing has evolved on Facebook.
Starwood’s innovative use of organic Instagram posts show there is still room for marketers to innovate on the platform.
