NB: This is a guest article by Justin Reid, director of destination marketing at Betapond.
We’ve got one message for travel brands using Facebook as a marketing platform - forget fixations over "LIKE" and focus on how many people are actually visiting your destination or attraction.
The good news is that achieving this just became a whole lot easier thanks to one of Facebook’s newest features, the so-called Were Here API.
Let’s take a few steps back and I’ll explain why.
For travel brands, social media has always been a fantastic vehicle for creating interest in a destination. Facebook in particular, with its reach, analytics and photo galleries has always been the best platform from which to operate.
And when it comes to metrics, Likes have always been one of the most popular KPIs.
All this still holds true, apart from that last statement.
Beyond LIKES
Likes are no longer (and some would argue never have been) a good indicator of success. Think about it, what good are a million fans if 99% of them only liked your destination page because you ran a competition inviting them to win an iPad?
All this leaves us with an obvious question: if Likes don’t matter, then what does? The answer is simple – you need to engage with the people out there that have a meaningful connection or affinity with your destination.
How do you do this? Here are the three key steps:
- If you are the official Facebook Page for a destination then you need to claim the Places Page and merge the two. This will ensure that your Page displays all the necessary data in one handy place.
- You need to create (or tweak your existing) app strategy to persuade as many of your fans as possible to access their Facebook data.
- You need to focus on the three most important pieces of Facebook data – "People Talking About", "People Reached" and "Were Here".
These first two data points will be familiar to anyone that has ventured into Facebook Insights. This dashboard gives you unique information about the level of engagement your Page is receiving.
The newest of these datapoints is Were Here. It’s also the one that, for travel brands at least, is most interesting.
Were Here lets you see how many check-ins, mobile device shares or photo location tags have been created around your destination or attraction.
Facebook ROI
By combining the metrics above, you can find out how many of your fans have actually visited your destination or attraction and you can begin to put together a pretty convincing business case for Facebook marketing.
For example, if you multiply this figure by the average spend per visitor then you’ll start to paint a picture of Facebook ROI that would make any CFO stand up and take note!
This just goes to show how Were Here data can really add value to Facebook Marketing for travel brands, but it is by no means the only example.
Here at Betapond we’ve just finished building the very first Facebook app to use the Were Here API, for Lowcostholidays.
It taps into all the Were Here data that is available on Facebook and creates a leaderboard of all the most visited destinations in the world.
Who’s been where?
As well as providing a top ten of the most popular "all time destinations", the app is categorised into types of holiday destinations such as "clubbing holidays" and "couples holidays".
This helps users looking for a specific kind of break to see where the most popular places are and will also show them whether their friends have visited specific destinations and allows them to post to their timeline directly from the app.
To give you another practical example of the power of Were Here, take The O2. It is currently the number one visited attraction on the Love UK Top 50 UK Places Facebook app with over 170,000 check-ins.
If you add to that all the other location data that is now available through the API (i.e. people, photos and albums tagged) the number of Facebook users that have engaged with The O2 during their visit is closer to 400,000.
This incredibly powerful information could be a real game changer; linking online and offline and maximising engagement opportunities.
If you want to know the future of success for Facebook Marketing, it’s data. To succeed, you’ll need to collect and use data as part of an ongoing app strategy that brings value to your fans and increases engagement.
With Were Here Facebook is making this easier than ever. So what are you waiting for?
NB: This is a guest article by Justin Reid, director of destination marketing at Betapond.