Data showing that search engines now account for less traffic than social networks illustrates two things: search is changing forever and travel companies need to act fast.
Hitwisereleased an important set of data this afternoon: traffic to social networks in the UK such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube accounted for 11.88% of all traffic in the country in May 2010, passing the search engines with 11.33%.
[Some have questioned whether a site such as YouTube should be categorised as a social network - read Hitwise's response]
Such changes in online user behaviour are fascinating, but especially for the travel sector where search is such an important part of the discovery process.
First of all the data indicates how omnipresent social networks have become in everyday web use - in this case, Facebook takes a mammoth 55% share of all social networking traffic.
Now it would be interesting to see, as and when such data becomes available, if and how much consumers are using social networks for search.
As Facebook integrates such features as Facebook Questions then it would logical to presume that they will use social media for search even more. And Twitter, for example, can be a reasonably useful search engine for mentions about destinations or travel brands.
So what does this mean for travel?
- A social media strategy should be one of the most important areas in a marketing plan.
- Travel companies must create profiles on social networking sites, especially Facebook.
- Monitoring social media activity should be a requirement, not something that is done haphazardly.
- Companies must engage with users on social networks, understand where and what the conversation is.
- Every part of the marketing plan must be joined up - offline-to-online-to-social.
- Search engine optimisation and keyword buying should have a social element.