NB: This is a viewpoint from Pamela Whitby at EyeforTravel.
Facebook is dreaming of a world where personalisation is no longer just a marketing buzzword and relevance is a reality.
In this world a highly targeted Facebook audience is delivered timely, relevant offers which leads them to planning for and booking their next trip, meal or concert in no time at all, says Neasa Costin, who runs global marketing solutions for travel at Facebook.
"It is a world where people come first and the best experiences are shared."
This is the new wave of travel marketing and Facebook clearly wants to be riding it. Certainly all the social giant’s recent developments seem to point in that direction.
The recently launched Graph Search and Facebook Nearby both rely heavily on the personal and relevant wisdom of friends, and on people sharing.
As many in the travel industry will already know, Graph Search allows users to search activity of friends. For example:
"Hotels my friends have stayed at in Barcelona."
Likewise Nearby is Facebook’s mobile offering of filtering information of hotels, restaurants and so on in the nearby area that your friends have reviewed or checked into.
What could be more relevant or useful to your search than the knowledge that your friends have been there? asks Costin.
It’s not rocket science. After all, where do people turn first when they want a recommendation? To people they know, to friends and family.
A report by Nielsen, which surveyed more than 28,000 Internet respondents in 56 countries, reveals that 92% of consumers say they trust recommendations from friends and family above all other forms of advertising.
Online consumer reviews rank as the second most trusted source, with 70% of global consumers surveyed online indicating they trust messages on this platform, a rise of 15% in four years.
Little wonder then that TripAdvisor has integrated with the Facebook platform to customise the user experience; reviews by friends are clearly far more relevant than 100 reviews from complete strangers.
Who wants to read a negative review if it isn’t relevant? Charlie Osmond, the founder of a new review site Triptease (TLabs here), is on a mission to make the web more beautiful.
He wonders if negative reviews are necessary at all and sees TripAdvisor as both "ugly" and "dated".
"Travel is about anticipation and anticipation is free happiness."
He argues that before a trip you don’t want to read a negative review to dampen the excitement, you want a relevant, inspiring and visually stunning review.
According to Osmond this is next wave of the web, and one he wants to be on.
Content counts and sharing matters
In this next wave, travel brands must engage their audience with strategic, relevant, beautiful content and most importantly to engage them on their device of choice.
According to Costin, that device is very much a mobile product with more people accessing Facebook via mobile today than desktop.
In this mobile world, the ultimate aim is to create content that gets people sharing at all stages of the journey. Social touches every part of travel and sharing is at the heart of everything.
In fact, according to Costin, Facebook research shows that 25% of people start dreaming of travelling after viewing friends’ photos and 11% go on to plan a trip in the same destination.
When they are in destination they share and when they return they curate their best 20 photos to reflect on the experience. This proves yet another catalyst to get friends dreaming, Costin says.
Some travel brands, from tourism agencies to online travel agents and airlines, pay successful bloggers to help them produce shareable, engaging content.
According to Oliver Gradwell, the founder of Travel Bloggers Unite, a community for travel bloggers, bloggers can help travel brands before during and after a trip.
Pre trip they can share their plans with friends and followers on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This gets people excited to see their progress and updates and is a good opportunity for travel bloggers to interact with their followers by asking questions.
One day they could ask:
"Does anyone have recommendations for a cheap cafe in Prague?"
And here you start to see where Facebook Graph Search becomes useful. At the destination itself, and with wifi now regularly available, bloggers can immediately upload something as simple as a beautiful sunset.
Finally, post-trip, travel bloggers can edit photos and videos from their journey which becomes useful content for travel partners.
"While it’s great reading about a skydive, a video of the actual dive taken with a Go-Pro camera is even better and will interest people even more," argues Gradwell.
Spoilt for choice
"There is so much information out there and so much choice for consumers," says Costin. People don’t want to see 50 hotels in a particular area, they want to see the hotels most relevant to what they are looking for and with Facebook Nearby this is becoming possible.
So whether brands are engaging bloggers to do it for them, or doing it in house, a serious content and publishing strategy is imperative.
Brands need to work on building solid connections and targeting their existing audience and then enable them to influence their friends. Facebook’s custom audiences let marketers find their offline audiences on Facebook.
Using email addresses, phone numbers or Facebook user IDs to make the match, you can now find the exact audiences you want to talk to, by creating custom audiences that are defined by what you already know.
This is a great product to re-enage with your database.
One mistake that brands have made in the past is running too many competitions or sweepstakes.
"We would discourage this as a way of engaging with your customers," says Costin. Competitions may grow a fan base, but Facebook believes it is better to target existing customers who already have an affinity with a brand and get them to talk about you.
This, she says, is far more powerful than building volume.
Using custom audiences to target their most loyal customers and then retargeting through Facebook Exchange is proving successful for many brands.
Facebook Exchange is ideal for marketers who want to expand the reach of their exchange-based remarketing and behavioral targeted audience buys across Facebook’s 1 billon global monthly active user base.
The power of the personal
Returning to the heart of the matter, Costin firmly believes that personalisation is going to become key in travel space.
"I think Facebook will allow travel brands to achieve that," she says. While it is still early days – both Facebook Graph Search and Nearby are still in beta – they will have huge potential to help marketers reach the right people, with the right products, at the right time – and, most importantly, at scale.
Right now, there is no travel client offering a similar service to Amazon for the travel world, no one place you can go for suggestions and recommendations.
This presents and huge opportunity for the travel industry, and dare we say it, for Facebook and others too.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Pamela Whitby at EyeforTravel.
NB2: Costin will be speaking at the EyeforTravel Travel Distribution Summit in London from May 23-34 2013.
NB3:Love me image via Shutterstock.