THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!

Special Project

Special Project
From the 15th Annual Shorty Awards

Hilton For The Stay Social Engagements

Finalist in Community Management

Objectives

In July 2022, Hilton launched a new global brand platform, "Hilton. For The Stay" which inspired the "It Matters Where You Stay" campaign. To support the campaign, we set out to increase brand affinity by reminding people that a Hilton Stay means making each guest feel truly cared for. To do this, we recognized the opportunity to leverage community management on the @Hilton social channels to deliver a marketing and customer service experience like no other. We knew breaking the status quo would help differentiate us from our competitors and position Hilton as the go-to hotel brand.

Strategy and Execution

We knew we could position Hilton as the "hero" by utilizing our social listening tools and capitalizing on trends to insert “The Stay” into everyday social media conversations. We achieved these goals by monitoring Twitter, Instagram and TikTok for opportunities where we could: 

Our Hilton For The Stay engagement strategy was comprised of three different engagement levels:

Level One: Engage and Respond

Hopping in on trending content and interacting with social users through likes and witty, yet thoughtful, responses that emphasize what sets Hilton apart.

Level Two: Surprise and Delight

Find customers having a challenging travel experience and offer solutions such as comped stays, swag bags or Hilton Honors Points to enhance brand loyalty as well as make their next “Stay” more enjoyable.

Level Three: Storytelling and Content

Turning these Stay moments into meaningful, storytelling opportunities by coordinating bigger activations that are unique and represent Hilton’s brand.

Because we had an engagement goals we wanted to meet, we knew that it was important to feel empowered to own this process and operate in a way that allowed us to move quickly. But with new processes come challenges, and we did run into a few – finding the right opportunities to insert Hilton given platform limitations, aligning internally, and getting an expedited review and approval process in place.

But we grew together and have overcome those challenges to produce viral (and most of the time heartfelt) moments that have been featured on outlets such as Pop Crush, The Independent, LAD Bible, and Your Mileage May Vary.

Results

We met our social customers where they were, and in turn, we saw an uptick in social engagements, surprise and delight moments and compelling content being created by others.

Since the start of our Hilton For The Stay engagements, our efforts have helped bring massive online brand equity to our social media presence. In less than a year, this strategy helped propel Hilton to become the #1 hospitality brand on TikTok with over 1.16M engagements in total.

Some of our favorite moments include:

These and other moments have resulted in:

Media

Video for Hilton For The Stay Social Engagements

Entrant Company / Organization Name

Hilton

Links

Entry Credits