International hotel chain Minor Hotels uses Sprout to boost its online presence

Minor Hotels is an international hotel owner, operator and investor from Bangkok, Thailand, with a portfolio of over 550 hotels in 55 countries spread across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, the Indian Ocean, Europe and the Americas. When Acharee Punyashthiti joined the company six years ago as Assistant Director of Social Media and Advertising, the team had little to no insights into how their social media efforts were performing—whether their campaigns were resonating or bringing in new customers for their hotels.

According to Acharee, it took them at least two days to manually collate and extract information from their social media campaigns. This meant they could only report monthly, making it difficult to establish informed key performance indicators (KPIs) or measure progress swiftly. Acharee knew that they needed to start making investments in their social media efforts.

“Social media has become more and more important as a channel as compared to before. We see social media as playing a key role in our business and how we communicate,” she said.

Manual reporting was acceptable in the early days when they had fewer hotels to manage. But with Minor Hotels growing significantly in the past few years, and real-time insights becoming even more important as the travel and tourism industry becomes more competitive, Acharee needed a solution that could keep up with the times. Specifically, a tool that would help them derive more insights from their campaigns more frequently and manage the growing number of social media accounts they handle.

The company started testing out various social media platforms to boost its online presence and measure its growth and performance. But ultimately, Acharee and her team decided to use Sprout Social in 2020—here’s why.

Social media content planning all in one place

For Acharee, one of the biggest draws of Sprout Social was its ability to streamline the company’s editorial operations. Sprout’s intuitive social media calendar allowed social media specialists to centralize their content, visualize and schedule their posts, and edit and track posts as needed.

Acharee also liked the collaborative aspect of Sprout. She’s able to see and review the social media calendars of various hotels and add notes directly. She can also pull up information on any account, at any time.

“In my role, I don’t just manage brand accounts, I also need to know how different regions or hotels are doing. So being able to have that visibility is critical,” Acharee said. “With Sprout, I can see which property I want to gather information about and review the specific goals and performance metrics for each.”

Sprout also enables social media managers to handle more accounts than before. According to Acharee, one social media specialist at Minor Hotels can now manage five to six accounts, which is about 10 to 12 social media profiles, when some could only manage two social media profiles before Sprout.

“City hotels like Anantara Siam Bangkok Hotel, which have around 16 social media channels, including Facebook and Instagram. So it’s almost impossible for our social media managers to manage the content natively. With Sprout, they can switch between profiles, schedule content, and pull reports from one place,” she said.

On-demand reporting, anytime, anywhere

Sprout’s reporting features allow businesses to parse through complex information and cut straight to the insights that can make a difference in their social media efforts. This is particularly useful for large organizations like Minor Hotels, which handles hundreds of brands, hotel chains and social media accounts.

“Every time we post content about a certain hotel, we add a Tag of the hotel code there. At the end of the month, we’re able to run a report and see how many times we mentioned a certain hotel and what other hotels might need more attention. So we’re able to allocate our social media resources more efficiently,” she said. “Before, we did this all by hand in Excel.”

Sprout’s competitor reports, in particular, have been useful to Acharee’s team. She said it allows them to “quickly understand our brand/page health, see how we are doing against our competitors, learn what works and what doesn’t, and then adapt our social media marketing strategy.”

Today, Acharee and her team have weekly or sometimes bi-weekly reporting meetings, which helps them monitor social media performance and inform business strategy. Sprout’s Listening tool allows them to identify top trends, topics and posts that are working for their competitors.

“To gauge how well we’re doing, we also need to understand how we stack up against our competitors. With Sprout’s reporting functions, we know where we stand,” Acharee said.

Because social media changes every day, we find the competitors we can pull directly from Sprout Social helps a lot. We can monitor timely social media trends, see what our competitors are doing and adjust our strategy accordingly.

Acharee Punyashthiti
Assistant Director, Social Media and Advertising

While these reports play a tactical role in Minor Hotel’s overarching strategy, the data gleaned from these reports contribute to the bigger picture of enticing consumers to choose Minor Hotels whenever they travel.

“Social media content, especially user-generated content, plays a very important role when clients or customers are planning a trip. So social media is very important for us in terms of inspiring people to book or share their experiences.”

Seamless integrations with existing software

Introducing new software into your existing operations—from training employees on the tool to integrating it into their daily workflows—is no easy task. Leaders also need to consider how new software will fit into their existing tech stack, and how that will impact their teams’ overall productivity.

This is why Sprout has multiple integrations with some of the most used software applications out there, including social media, business intelligence, lead generation and CRM, messaging, reputation and review management, social commerce, and more. This saves people from having to switch applications, needlessly downloading and uploading content, and changing up their workflows too much.

Because of Sprout’s multiple integration capabilities, Minor Hotels can streamline processes across the tools their team already uses regularly, including Canva, Google Analytics and Zendesk. The Zendesk integration in particular facilitates Minor Hotels’ ticketing system between the corporate office and various properties. Their customer contact center also uses this to respond to direct messages for Anantara and Avani brand accounts.

Sprout helps you work smarter, not harder

Acharee said that online presence plays an essential role in brand image and attracting customers for travel and tourism brands. She would recommend Sprout to other specialists who handle multiple social media channels. “Sprout will streamline your workflow to help you work smarter—not harder.”

To learn more about how Sprout can make your team more efficient and surface relevant insights faster, request a personalized demo today.