What It's Like to Manage Social Media at Best Western

Featuring Emily Huffer, Social Media Manager and Content Producer at Best Western Hotels and Resorts

Hi, everyone! After a little end-of-summer hiatus, Handling It is back, and with your favorite marketer’s favorite marketer: Emily Huffer.

Emily runs organic social for Best Western (technically, BWH Hotels, but we’ll get into that). When she’s not managing 100+ influencers or dreaming up collabs with companies like WeRateDogs for work, she’s experimenting on her own channels to keep her skills sharp, and her energy is contagious (if you don’t follow her on LinkedIn, do yourself a favor).

This conversation ranges from the practical to the philosophical — roles don’t look like they did a year ago, because the algorithms, and the world, don’t either.

I loved Emily’s thoughts on how to navigate these changes, dispel myths about Best Western (spoiler: most hotels are locally-owned), and find the pockets of goodness that still exist on social media when you’re just about ready to throw your phone out the window (we’ve all been there).

Without further ado…

Name: Emily Huffer
Handle(s): @bestwestern
Location: Phoenix, Arizona
Office requirement: Hybrid - 2 days in office, 3 at home

What’s your role at Best Western, and how long have you been there?

My official title is Social Media Manager and Content Producer — with a twist on the end. If you go on LinkedIn, they’re like, “Social media managers are not content creators,” but that’s me. I’m one of those people. And I’ve been at Best Western for two years and three months now.

How did you land your role?

I got really lucky. I saw it on Indeed or Glassdoor, and just happened to apply. I think I was that perfect middle ground social media person, where I wasn’t ten years of experience deep and looking for a director role, but I also wasn’t straight out of college. I had two years of experience at an agency beforehand. And I didn’t know anyone there. People are always like, “Who did you know?” I didn’t know anyone! I magically happened to find this, and it all worked out.

You don’t hear that too much anymore! Did you have hospitality or tourism clients at the agency?

I had two hotel clients, so that helped. And I think people always appreciate those who come from an agency background, just because it can be so hectic and chaotic. You know how to roll with the punches.

Where does social sit within the team at Best Western, and is there anyone else on the team dedicated to social?

I’m the Social Media Manager, and then I have my manager, Bryan, and he and I are essentially the entire organic social media team. We have a separate paid advertising team, but we do everything ourselves, in-house, for the most part.

Our global headquarters is in Phoenix, Arizona, but we have different regional teams — a team in Great Britain, in Australia, in Latin America, etc., and they all have their own social channels, as well. This year specifically, we’ve been trying to do more collaboration with our regional teams, figuring out how we can help send some influencers to those who may have smaller budgets than we do in North America.

If you look at our Instagram, it’s 90% collaboration posts. We have 4,000 hotels across the globe, and I can’t get to all of them, so we use influencers and creators for a lot of that coverage.

I technically work for BWH Hotels, which owns SureStay Hotels, Best Western Hotels and Resorts, and WorldHotels, which is a luxury brand that we acquired in 2019. We typically use the Best Western name, because that is what consumers are familiar with.

You mentioned Instagram — are there any other platforms that are your main focus right now, and do you think that’ll shift anytime soon?

Instagram is our main one. Our TikTok is currently dead. We’ve been working on our strategy, but it is a unique platform, and I truly believe you need a very separate social media strategy for it. Like many companies, there is some hesitation with showing employees and the worry about turnover, but as social moves along, we’re seeing that it’s very much more “people buy from people, not brands.” I’m confident we’ll get there, but we’re taking baby steps and making sure our leadership is aligned every step of the way.

We do have Facebook, but we mainly use it for running ads. Facebook is a tough one, just because it’s where most people go to leave complaints for us. We post, but the majority of the time, the comments are pretty negative. We’re actually considering not posting on Facebook — it’s an interesting spot right now. So Instagram is our priority.

What does a typical day look like for you?

I always spend a portion of my day responding to comments and DMs. Community management is one of my responsibilities, but thankfully, community management and customer service are two different things. When there are comments or DMs about specific complaints from a recent stay, our Customer Care team handles those requests. They have access to the background info, the insights into where the stay happened, who this guest is, etc.

Thankfully, our whole account is set up through Hootsuite. Our customer service team is also in Hootsuite, so we tag all of our messages depending on the topic, and I can assign it to them if it’s something that needs to be responded to immediately. Customer Care can often be overlooked, but they are such an important part of overall brand perception, and our team does a great job.

I do more of the fun community management. If someone tags us in a post, it’s like, “Thanks for staying with us! Can’t wait to have you back soon,” that sort of thing. We’re also doing more outbound community management and engagement, which I would love to spend more time on. But as I said, we’re a lean team, so I don’t get to just scroll and comment on things as much as I would want. But we are trying to do more of that, which has been really fun. I’ve had a couple of comments blow up. My thought is, make sure it’s relevant to your industry and find some way to tie it back to who you are.

Influencer marketing is definitely a big part, and we get a lot of inbound messages asking if people can work with us. We also have an application page on Aspire’s Creator Marketplace, so that’s where people will also submit themselves to work with us. And then we do some outbound influencer outreach, but that’s really only if I’m scrolling on my own feed. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this person would be so good for Best Western.” I’ll reach out that way.

But I would say it’s probably 70% people just coming into our DMs, another 20% from the Aspire marketplace, and then 10% is us actually reaching out to people. Influencer marketing is a big part of our day-to-day and we handle almost everything in Aspire. We have our contracts set out. We have all of our templated messages saved. And so we do everything from that first initial email to making sure we’re getting them booked, to the content at the end — it’s all in-house for us.

If 90% of your content is collab posts, that’s a lot of influencers to manage!

It is! Last year, we worked with 113 different creators and featured 230 different hotels.

My gosh!

Yeah, it’s all me and my boss, which is pretty crazy. This year, we’re at 112 creators already, and 298 hotels. Last year was the first year we ever did global stays where we sent North American influencers abroad and we featured 19 different countries. It’s cool stuff! It’s very fun.

When did your content calendar start shifting towards being so heavily influencer-based? Is that recent?

It’s been the past year. I just feel like influencers can create better content than I can from the office, so let’s put more time and effort into working with those influencers and creators.

But also, there’s been a big shift with algorithms. Before, you would plan a monthly content calendar, and even a year ago, I was probably making 12-ish posts a month, so maybe a post every other day.

But I don’t think posts go as far as they used to without it being very strategically created. Before, I could post these little itineraries, or I could re-share a trip from Brazil, and have a carousel of photos. That stuff used to perform better.

But these days, if you’re not really, really, really thinking about how this post is going to come across — is it shareable, is it saveable — if you’re not ticking very specific boxes with content, there’s almost no point in sharing it.

And there’s some crazy statistic where only 2% of your followers actually see your content. So when I think about that, I’m like, if I am going to get a post that is going to be seen by actual people, I want to make sure it’s really good, right? That’s where it’s leaning — less about the quantity and more about the quality, and trying to think of unique ways where people can see themselves in our content.

What’s something that people wouldn’t expect about running social at Best Western?

I mentioned it earlier, but people don’t know that we have the other regional pages. We have Best Western Australia, Best Western Central Europe, etc. If you’re going to travel to Central Europe and you don’t really know which countries you want to choose, they’re a great resource to see where we have different hotels.

The other thing is, it’s honestly really hard to grow a community on social media these days when you are a big brand. A lot of the time, the people engaging with us on our Instagram will be creators and people we’ve worked with in the past, and then on Facebook, it’s a lot of negative and completely irrelevant comments.

People love to talk about building a community, but it’s really hard as a big brand to have people see you — the bigger the company, the less human it can feel. So it’s a hard thing: How can we come across as hospitable, friendly, and welcoming, without people being like, “Oh, this is just a huge corporation, and they just make millions of dollars.”

And what a lot of people don’t expect about Best Western is that our hotels are almost all individually owned and operated, so we’re actually a franchise! That’s something I always try to lead with: You’re not necessarily supporting this huge corporation. You’re supporting a local resident who owns the hotel in your area.

Wow, I had no idea. That’s awesome.

Yeah. So it can still be small, local-focused, even though they’re part of a larger brand.

What are the perks of working at Best Western? I would imagine that you get to go to hotels a lot, and you travel a lot.

I do get an employee discount and a friends and family discount!

I used to travel once a month or so, to specific regions in North America to help with their social media and create articles for our blog, Travel Zone. But we’ve just found it’s better for my time management and better reach and brand awareness to use influencers instead. So I do less traveling these days, which is fine, because I have a lot more on my plate now.

Working in hospitality and travel — if I could choose any industry, this would probably be in the top three. There are a lot of ways that you can have fun with it. And I hear awesome stories of people going on road trips and checking off their last national park, or going to every MLB stadium, or going on a trip with their grandparents — and Best Western helped to make that possible. It’s usually pretty happy content that I get to work with.

That’s the best. When I worked on Broadway, responding to happy people — especially first-time theatre-goers — was my favorite part.

Yeah, it makes me feel good.

What is the biggest challenge of working in social at Best Western?

What’s really hard for us right now is that people message us thinking that they’re talking to the specific hotel they’re staying at, and that’s not the case. Sometimes they’ll ask, “Oh, can you check room 219, because I left my bracelet there,” and I’m like, oh my gosh.

I have to ask so many questions just to figure out which hotel the guest is at and then figure out how to contact them. So that’s definitely one of the bigger challenges, it can take a long time to get to a point where we can actually help.

Sometimes people are already at the hotel, and they want to message Instagram or Facebook instead of going downstairs to the front desk. And coming from the social media marketing perspective, we know that’s not how social media works. But sometimes I’m like, oh my goodness. Do you guys really think that when you message this Instagram account with almost 100,000 followers that you’re talking directly to the hotel? That’s something that always gets me.

What! That is shocking.

Yeah, I see some crazy DMs too.

Is there a post, campaign, or milestone that you’re particularly proud of?

I talk about this all the time, but I’m going to keep talking about it. We partnered with WeRateDogs this past year. I like to describe them as the happiest corner of the internet — it’s just dog content. It all started on Twitter a long time ago, where people would send in their photos, and then they would rate the dogs — and it was always at least 11 out of 10, maybe even 12 out of 10. Just super cute, wholesome stuff.

But they’ve grown a ton. They have 16 million followers across platforms, and we learned through some of our Hootsuite listening that our guests who had pets were more inclined to stay with us than other hotel competitors.

So I had been doing some outbound engagement and with the WeRateDogs posts, and they actually ended up messaging us. They said, “We haven’t worked with a hotel brand. We would love to do this.” And I was like, oh my goodness, I have to figure out how to do this.

We hadn’t done a partnership quite like that before with another brand. It was outside of our normal influencer content. But I was like, we have to make this happen. This is the gemstone of the entire internet for dog lovers. And so we did. I made decks, had to get leadership buy-in and do all that stuff, and now we’ve done four different campaigns with them.

The ones that we normally do are “Rescue Rides” — WeRateDogs will work with a local volunteer rescue ride, and we’ll find a dog or two and try to get them from point A to wherever they need to go.

These rescue rides happen with volunteers who drive an hour, and then hand the dog off to the next volunteer. They will go cross-country on these road trips. And when they hand off the dogs to the next volunteer, it normally happens in Best Western parking lots. Then if they need an overnight stay, they’ll stay at a Best Western, and we’ll help them get to their new home or a new rescue. It’s really wholesome, sweet content.

weratedogs

A post shared by @weratedogs

Their may brand tagline is “Tell your dog I said hi.” If you’ve ever seen that on cars, that’s all them.

I’ve definitely seen that! So, so fun. What’s your favorite part about working in social media?

I really love how you can connect with people. At Best Western, we’ll get a message like, “We had the best time because Melinda at breakfast was the most amazing person ever.”

Or, someone left us a review on Instagram recently: ‘We come for medical visits and the hotel was so accommodating, and they brought in a medical chair so that my wife could get into the bed.’”

Hearing about those individual stories where people go above and beyond or had a really great stay somewhere is the best part of social media. And it just reminds me, “Okay, social media does real good.”

I get to share these great stories with the regional area or the property manager, too. It keeps your faith in humanity and makes me proud to be part of the brand.

Because social media can be such a terrible, dark place, too. So, I love the positive and the happy side of social media, because it is out there. You might have to dig for it harder, and you might not see it as often these days, but it really is out there. I love that aspect of it.

You’ve become a bit of a thought leader and content creator yourself — is that an avenue you would ever want to pursue? Or do you like managing social for brands?

That’s such a funny question, because from my perspective, I’m not any type of big creator. But then you have your friends who are like, “Oh my gosh, you’re an influencer.”

But I like stability and I like structure. So I don’t think I could ever give up working for a brand or an agency and go off on my own unless I was starting my own agency. I just — I like the paycheck every two weeks. I like knowing how much it’s going to be.

The idea of giving that up is really scary to me. So I don’t ever see myself going full-time creator-mode or freelance. I like the cushion of a 9-to-5 with some corporate perks and healthcare.

Do you see yourself staying in social media long-term?

A lot of social media managers love social media, but they also want to throw their phone off a cliff. It’s a really weird balance where sometimes I’m like, I just make crafts and be a farmers market girl, you know?

I see myself enjoying social media long-term, and it’s only growing from here. I like the idea of being part of the industry as it’s becoming more important for brands and companies, and the longevity of businesses.

But yeah, there’s always that question, in the back of my head, “Do I just live in a van and make coffee?” I don’t know. That’s the big question.

What advice would you give someone who wants to work in social media?

This is one of my hot takes: If you’re a social media manager, you should be posting on some platform.

It can be Threads, TikTok, LinkedIn, I don’t care. You don’t even have to show your face. You can go anonymous, you can have a whole different personality. But there is something so influential and important about learning and testing things yourself, because you’re not always going to have that flexibility when working for a brand.

Posting on my own is the best way for me to get an understanding of what new features are out, what sort of things I can add to posts now that I don’t always know if I’m only posting for the brand.

So that’s always my biggest tip — try posting. You can learn a lot. You might grow your own following. It gives you a better idea of how to answer questions if you do get interviews about social media, because you already have that experience yourself.

For you, is that your LinkedIn, or do you have a secret finsta you’ve been posting to?

It’s mainly LinkedIn for me right now. I have TikTok, and I had a post back in 2022 blow up that made way too many people follow me so I have around 9,000 followers on there right now. But sometimes I wonder if I just need to start over and have a fresh slate. But I like posting on TikTok to post on TikTok, just for fun.

I’ll post swimming things — I’m a big swimmer — or crafty things or work things. I have no strategy. I have no goals with it. I just like to post because it’s like my own digital scrapbook. But I learn a lot doing that, too.

Very cool. Finally, if you could run social for any brand besides Best Western, what would it be?

I would say Patagonia. I love Patagonia and everything they stand for. They’re sustainable. They know who they are. Their stuff lasts forever. They, from my understanding, treat their employees really well. That would be cool to work for as a brand.

But as far as social media content goes, I think it would be so fun to work for Etsy — be their social media manager and work with a bunch of crafty creators and feature them on their Instagram and TikTok.

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Shoutout to Emily for letting us peek behind the curtain at life in social media at Best Western. Whether you’re in social media or just fascinated by how brands navigate these platforms, Emily’s approach to quality over quantity is worth bookmarking.

Hospitality is an industry I was dying to learn more about, and both the perks and the pain points were full of surprises (I will never get over people DM’ing their corporate Instagram to see if they left a bracelet in their room 💀).

You can connect with Emily on LinkedIn, and follow her work for Best Western on Instagram.

Thanks again for reading Handling It! Have a lovely day. 💜