How should a hotel use social media to get more bookings?

Why more posts don’t fill more rooms

Ask Google, ChatGPT or Gemini how a hotel should use social media and you’ll get the same list: short-form video, room tours, the 80/20 rule, user-generated content, micro-influencers, a “Book now” link in the bio. It’s sound advice, and you’ll find it in any hotel marketing guide.

What the list leaves out is how guests use these platforms before they book. They don’t wait for a hotel’s post to reach them. They search: “where to stay in langkawi with kids”, “maldives resort with water slide”, “st tropez best luxury hotel”. The videos that come up shape which hotels make the shortlist.

A more useful question is: when guests search, do they find us? In the TikTok searches we checked, hotels rarely appeared.

How often guests find hotels today

When we looked at the top 20 TikTok results for 15 US hotel searches in September and October 2026, hotels’ own accounts held 14 of the 300 results, and 1 of the 45 top-three places. Creators, and accounts that repost other people’s travel videos, held 272.

The same pattern shows up for destinations. Across 73 New Zealand travel searches on TikTok and Instagram in October 2026, businesses of every kind, hotels included, held about 15% of the top-20 results (our New Zealand recount).

Your guests are searching, and someone is answering. On TikTok, that’s usually a creator.

Step 1: find the searches

Start with your destination and type of stay, then look at what guests add to it. In Google’s suggestions for 12 hotel searches, the most common additions were who is travelling (“with kids”, “for honeymoon”) and proof from other travellers (“reddit”, “worth it”). A specific feature came next. Price was rare.

Pick the 15 to 30 searches you can genuinely answer. If you have no kids’ club, leave the family searches to someone else. See what travellers search before booking a hotel.

Step 2: see who answers them

Search each one on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube and note the top results. Is it you, a competitor, a creator, a booking site or a travel publisher? Check the AI answers to the same searches too.

Search from your guests’ country, not yours. TikTok, Instagram and YouTube show different results for the same search in different countries, and AI answers vary by country too. A hotel in Bali that checks “best family resort in bali” from Bali sees a different page from a family searching in Sydney or Singapore. Run each search from the market you want to reach, and in its language. Otherwise you’ll measure the wrong results. That’s the hardest part to do by hand, and it’s why SocialSeal runs every search from the market you choose.

Even for hotel marketing questions, 11 of the 36 sources Google’s AI Overviews cited were TikTok, YouTube or Instagram videos.

Now you have a list of gaps: searches your guests make where you don’t appear.

Step 3: make the answer, or brief it

For each gap, decide who should answer:

• Your own account, when the search is about something only you can show: your pool, your rooms, your view at sunset. Use the words in the search, in the caption and on screen.
• A creator who already ranks, when creators hold the top places. Brief them to the exact search. See how to market a hotel on TikTok for what ranks.

Write the brief from the search itself. “Best hotel in Langkawi for honeymoon” needs a couple’s point of view, filmed where a couple would spend their day.

Step 4: count appearances, not views

Re-check the same searches every month and count how many you appear in. That number tells you whether guests choosing a hotel can find you, which views alone can’t.

That’s how we measured one luxury Maldives resort. None of the 13 surf searches we tracked on Instagram in January and February 2026 showed the resort in the top 9. By the end of March, 7 did. The searches were the ones its guests type: “family surf holidays maldives”, “private surf break maldives”, “best maldives resorts kid surfing”.

By then we were tracking 18 searches, 5 of them added in March. In the latest capture of all 18, the resort held 8 of the 144 results shown (some searches returned fewer than 9).

What about direct bookings?

Social media can send guests straight to your booking engine, but only after it has done its first job: getting you onto the shortlist. Once a guest finds you, the usual advice works. Put a direct booking link in your profile, make the landing page fast, and give a reason to book direct, such as breakfast or a late check-out, that booking sites can’t match.

Measure both. Appearances tell you whether guests are finding you. Booking-engine visits from social tell you whether they act.

More on hotel social media marketing

• What travellers search before booking a hotel
• How to market a hotel on TikTok
• How to track your hotel in AI answers