In July 2025, the hotel marketing association (HMA) delivered a fantastically-useful webinar on social media essentials, designed for anyone using organic social media to promote their business.

Their guest speaker, Chloe Parry, Content Marketing Executive at Carden Park shared her ‘on-the-ground’ insights into the latest algorithm updates and future developments across major platforms being utilised by hotel marketers. Here’s what I scribbled down during her webinar:

AI for marketing; explore yes, but always proof output

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used across various industries and applications; it influences your social media feed and suggested posts and can be great at creating personalised travel itineraries.

For example, Expedia has recently launched their Trip Matching feature, which creates travel itineraries from Instagram Reels. This new feature analyses the content of Instagram Reels, including imagery and descriptions, to generate personalised travel recommendations and booking options. It essentially transforms social media inspiration into tangible travel plans by leveraging AI capabilities. Useful? Absolutely! However, Chloe noted it wasn't 100% accurate:

“This is still a really neat feature, and could be good for other people, discovering the hotel and discovering what we have in the hotel without even needing to contact us. The downside is it's all through Expedia, so enquiries wouldn't come directly to our website. But we could see more hotels integrating AI into Instagram and coming up with a similar feature.”

Video is not going anywhere

Video featured regularly in Chloe’s talk and as keen travellers ourselves, we can see why. From a guest perspective, beautiful video content is eye-catching and when executed well, it encourages prospective guests to experience that content.

Interesting points to note:

While there are a plethora of third-party editing tools, Instagram does not favor any videos that are uploaded through these (e.g. CapCut)
Facebook is turning every video post into a reel. However, there is a little bit of a caveat to that; video carousel posts remain.
The hotel marketing landscape has changed and there is demand on marketing teams to prioritise video content which can be tricky for smaller teams without a dedicated function.
Videos perform well on Linkedin for overall impressions, and Chloe is seeing more and more of the portrait, vertical style videos
Twitter continues to push video content but users are leaving to go to BlueSky which has trending topics and is exploring a dedicated video feed
Insights from Carden Park: long form videos are usually better for growing the channel. But that’s not to say posting shorts can’t grow your channel.
Video mashups with music are easier to create on TikTok owing to royalty-free tunes

Linkedin

A lot of our hotel clients use Linkedin so this was a helpful download and great to hear multiple image posts excel for generating likes, document/PDF posts help to drive comments and shares, because (designed nicely) they can hold quite a lot of information.

Instagram

You may have seen Meta AI has been implemented in-app across messages and the search function? This is great for consumers searching for travel inspiration

From the 10th of July, public page posts will automatically be shown in search engine results. This could help grow your channel and reach more people.
It is recommended if you do have a short caption, adding in the visual description underneath that as well within the caption to aid SEO efforts.

We look forward to seeing how hospitality businesses leverage these social media updates with the ultimate goal of bolstering guest loyalty and increasing bookings.

To learn more about Chloe’s social media insights at Carden Park and essentials round-up, head over to the Hotel Marketing Association website or watch the webinar on demand here.