Your hotel may have beautiful rooms, a great pool, an incredible restaurant and a prime location—but none of those things automatically create a memorable social media presence.
Today, travelers use social media to decide where to stay, where to eat, what to do and, increasingly, which destinations are worth visiting. That means hotel social media needs to do more than showcase amenities. It needs to create a recognizable point of view and give people a reason to follow the brand before they ever book a room.
The hotels that stand out aren’t necessarily the ones posting the most. They’re the ones that have figured out what their brand should be known for on social media.
That starts with creating signature content series rather than relying on whatever trend happens to be popular that week.
Why Hotels Need Signature Content Series—Not Just Trends
Trends can be useful, but they shouldn’t be the foundation of a hotel’s social strategy.
A trending audio might generate views today, but it doesn’t necessarily build brand recognition tomorrow. When every hotel uses the same sound, transition or meme, the content becomes interchangeable. The viewer remembers the trend—not the hotel.
Signature content works differently.
A signature series has a recognizable format, concept, voice or recurring personality that audiences can associate with the brand. Each individual post can stand alone, but together the series builds familiarity and anticipation.
Marketing platform Later recommends treating recurring series as an ongoing content asset: give the series a repeatable format, an ownable name, a clear content pillar and a sustainable publishing cadence.
For hotels, this could mean creating a recurring series around:
- The people who work at the hotel
- Hidden details guests might miss
- Local recommendations
- Unexpected guest experiences
- Behind-the-scenes hotel operations
- Food and beverage
- Travel tips
- The property’s history
- Funny or relatable hotel moments
- A recurring host or personality
The goal isn’t to stop using trends. It’s to make trends support the brand rather than define it.
Think of trends as seasoning. Your signature content is the meal.
What Makes a Hotel’s Social Presence Feel Distinctive?
A signature social presence comes down to three things: recognition, personality and consistency.
Recognition
Someone should be able to see a piece of content and have a sense of where it came from before they see the handle.
That doesn’t necessarily mean putting a logo on every video. It can come from a recurring visual style, host, editing style, phrase, series name or storytelling format.
Personality
Hotels have personalities whether they intentionally create one or not.
A luxury resort might be sophisticated and aspirational. A boutique hotel might be quirky and design-forward. A historic property might be nostalgic and story-driven. A Las Vegas hotel might be playful, irreverent and energetic.
Social media is an opportunity to turn those characteristics into an actual voice.
Consistency
A signature series becomes recognizable because it happens more than once.
One funny video isn’t a content strategy. Ten episodes of a recognizable concept starts to become a brand asset.
This is particularly important because social platforms increasingly function like entertainment channels. Sprout Social notes that social has become a destination for video, with brands responding by building their own episodic content series.
What Hotels With Strong Social Presences Are Doing Well
Some of the best examples aren’t successful because they simply post beautiful hotel photography. They have created a larger story around the guest experience.
The Ritz-Carlton: Own the Idea of Memories
The Ritz-Carlton is one of the clearest examples of a hotel brand creating a social identity around a single powerful idea: memories.
Its long-running #RCMemories strategy encouraged guests to share their own experiences and gave the brand a way to collect and showcase those moments. At one point, the brand’s Instagram strategy was built entirely around approved user-generated content from guests.
That’s an important distinction.
Ritz-Carlton wasn’t simply saying:
“Look at our beautiful hotel.”
It was saying:
“Look at the memories people are making here.”
That shifts the content from advertising to storytelling.
The brand has also experimented with social-first storytelling, including a social film series that took audiences along on a journey through Ritz-Carlton Reserve destinations.
The takeaway: Find the emotional idea your hotel can own and build content around it.
For one property, that might be memories. For another, it could be adventure, nightlife, discovery, relaxation, romance or local culture.
The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas: Make the Property a Personality
The Cosmopolitan is a particularly relevant example for hotels competing in a destination like Las Vegas because the property has never positioned itself as simply a place to sleep.
Its identity is built around a lifestyle: restaurants, nightlife, entertainment, design, food, art and the broader Vegas experience.
That creates a much larger content universe.
Instead of limiting social content to rooms and amenities, a hotel can become a media brand for the experience surrounding the hotel.
This is particularly important in Las Vegas, where travelers aren’t simply booking accommodations. They’re choosing an experience.
The opportunity is to make the property feel like a character in the content—not just the setting.
The Biggest Mistake Hotels Make on Social Media
The most common problem we see across hotel social media isn’t necessarily bad content.
It’s interchangeable content.
Beautiful room.
Beautiful pool.
Beautiful cocktail.
Beautiful sunset.
Beautiful restaurant.
Repeat.
None of these things are inherently bad. In fact, they are necessary pieces of a hotel marketing strategy. The problem is when they become the entire strategy.
Mistake #1: Treating Instagram Like a Brochure
A brochure tells you what the hotel has.
Social media should show you what it feels like to be there.
There’s a significant difference between:
“Our hotel has a rooftop pool.”
and:
“POV: You checked into Vegas and haven’t looked at the time since.”
The second creates a scenario the viewer can imagine themselves experiencing.
That is what makes someone want to visit.
Mistake #2: Chasing Every Trend
Trends can provide reach, but if the brand has no consistent voice underneath them, the account becomes difficult to remember.
Hotels shouldn’t ask, “What trend should we do?”
They should ask:
“How could we make this trend feel unmistakably like us?”
Mistake #3: Making Everything Promotional
If every post is asking someone to book, dine, reserve or purchase something, the audience eventually learns that the account is advertising to them.
The best hotel content can sell without feeling like a sales pitch.
Show the bartender. Show the chef. Show the sunrise. Show the unexpected interaction. Show what happens behind the scenes. Show the local neighborhood. Show the guest experience.
Then occasionally tell people how to book it.
Mistake #4: Hiding the People
Hospitality is a people business.
Yet many hotel accounts feature beautiful buildings while barely featuring the people who make those experiences possible.
That is a missed opportunity.
Staff can become recurring characters. Concierges can become local experts. Bartenders can become personalities. Housekeepers can reveal hidden hotel details. Chefs can tell stories about the menu.
Even smaller hospitality businesses are finding success by putting real people at the center of social content. Sprout Social highlights Fyfield Manor, for example, where the owner became the personality behind humorous TikTok content.
Mistake #5: Treating “Local” as a Checkbox
Posting “5 things to do in [city]” once a month doesn’t necessarily make a hotel feel connected to its destination.
A strong hotel should feel like it belongs there.
That means developing relationships with local businesses, creators, artists, chefs and community members and making them part of the hotel’s content ecosystem.
Loews Hotels, for example, has explicitly emphasized building communities around its properties and using social listening to identify opportunities to surprise and delight guests.
How Do We Build a Signature Social Presence?
Start by answering one question:
If someone followed our hotel for a year, what would we want them to say we’re known for?
From there, build three to five repeatable content series.
For example:
“The Hotel Insider”
A recurring employee shares something guests don’t know about the property.
“Do This, Not That”
A local expert gives travelers a better way to experience the destination.
“Behind the Stay”
Short-form stories showing what it takes to create the guest experience.
“Ask the Concierge”
A recurring personality answers one real traveler question each week.
“Only at [Hotel Name]”
Unexpected, funny or memorable moments that could only happen at that property.
The exact concepts will depend on the hotel’s personality. The important thing is that each series is repeatable, recognizable and ownable.
The Goal Isn’t to Become the Hotel With the Most Content
It is to become the hotel people recognize.
The hospitality industry is already moving toward more video and richer visual storytelling. Sprout Social’s 2025 hospitality benchmarks found that video content increased across major platforms, including Instagram, where single-video posts rose from 25% to 30% of posts between 2023 and 2024.
But more video doesn’t automatically mean better social media.
The real opportunity is to create content that people associate with your hotel—even when they’re not actively looking for a place to stay.
The Ritz-Carlton made memories part of its social identity. Other properties have built their presence around destination expertise, design, humor, food, culture or the people behind the experience.
Your hotel needs to determine what your thing is.
Because the strongest hotel social presence isn’t:
“Here’s our hotel.”
It’s:
“Here’s why you should want to be part of our world.”
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