Sometimes the chaos that is Facebook can actually be a gold mine for travel brands, with even YouTube taking a back seat when it comes to video marketing.
On the one hand, India-based metasearch engine Ixigo's latest marketing effort (a short clip to showcase beaches to visit around the world) is nothing special, nor particularly slick in terms of production.
Here is the clip on YouTube:
Posted during the second week of January, 11 Unusual Beaches has captured a modest 11,500 views on YouTube.
But Ixigo managed to trigger something in the minds of its "fans" (just short of one million) when it posted the clip to its Facebook page at the same time.
Since it went live the video has been viewed over 48 million times, attracted 481,000 "likes" and 112,000 people have been motivated enough to comment on the post.
The success (if that's the right word) of the campaign illustrates that whilst YouTube's open platform can be a marketer's dream, in terms of simply placing a clip online and seeing what happens, Facebook internal virality around sharing and the ability to see clips on a user's newsfeed can lead to fundamentally different and unexpected outcomes.
The challenge for a travel brand is in the monitoring of the subsequent discussion, not least when a clip hits the big time.
Even the most enthusiastic and energetic web marketer or social media content manager will have problems keeping up with or responding to 112,000 comments.