One of the major benefits of social media is that it’s only seen by guests’ who want to see it; therefore you have a great opportunity to tell people who will care about your new app.

Did you know that Facebook allows you to create custom tabs on your page? You can create one that shows visitors the benefits of your app and where they can find it. Adding the custom tab to your guests’ Facebook experience could drive downloads.

In addition to custom tabs you can also create an event for the launch of app that will direct visitors to where and when they can download it. Once your app has reviews, sharing them as daily updates is also a good practice to instill confidence that your app is as good as you say it is.

(See how many tabs Norweigan has?)

If you have a good follower base, posting a daily update about your new app is a good twitter practice. When guests’ that use foursquare check-in to your hotel it’s often shared on twitter: Thank those guests for checking in and tell them that their smart phone can unlock hidden gems while they are on their trip if they download your app.

In addition to facebook and twitter, it’s also a good idea to discuss your hotel mobile app in your blog. You can add a sign off to each post similar to this one: “if you’d like to see more of what our hotel can offer, download our mobile app to your smart phone”. You can blog about any subject you want and that will still be an appropriate call to action. You can also develop posts about the app. Most hotel apps have between 6 and 10 tabs so you could write a post about each feature.

All of these options are free, but you could also run Facebook, Google, or LinkedIn ad campaigns. These pay per click (PPC) advertising options tend to offer great results because you can highly target who will view your ad and you only pay if someone clicks. (Those ads were all targetted based on my likes!)