Travelers continue to use social media as a key part of the travel experience, and yet travel brands are not evolving with more sophisticated approaches to the platform, Facebook says in a new report.
Facebook has long been the king of social, comfortably entrenched as the world's largest social network. Travel has always been a sizable part of the platform, providing ongoing interactions and engagement of users with travel brands before, during and after trips.
However, a recent report from Facebook and Deloitte emphasizes that travel brands must become more sophisticated as the shift away from TV continues. The report, which is the result of a global survey of 10,400 social media users, identifies some key ways that travel brands can improve their performance on social media.
In many ways, the report is a manifesto for a new approach to Facebook from the brand itself.
How social media is used for travel
The report lays out some percentages that highlight how users are engaging with social and travel:
- 76% of social media users have a dream trip list, but only 8% have been everywhere on the list.
- Social media ranks second to friends and family as source of travel ideas.
- Reviews continue to maintain importance in the travel process: 68% say reviews give them the confidence to book. That's a significant share!
- OTAs have a 37% share within this cohort.
- Holidays/vacations were the third-most reported topic that the surveyed social media users consumed.
The infographic below lays out the various consumer behaviors identified within this particular sample.
Rethinking the purpose of the platform — from social to digital
The report clearly pushes travel brands to redefine the very meaning of the "social" in social media. Rather than approach the platform the way that users do – ie. as "social" media – travel brands must approach this from a business angle in order to ensure the best performance.
The report points to three key mental points of reference when considering how to target effectively — and profitably — on the platform.
First, you need to let go of the consumer-centric view of digital channels. “Likes,” “follows,” and “shares,” have limited real-world value unless you take additional steps to derive value from the relationships they represent.
Second, you need to be more discriminating about the consumer connections you make online. Digital channels seduce marketers with the ability to reach “all the people”— but do you cast your net that wide with TV, radio, or print? Of course you don’t. Targeting is the key, and when it comes to the ability to target down to the individual level, digital channels blow other media out of the water.
Third, you have to be careful about the way you build digital marketing into the structure of your organization. If you set it apart in a distinct department, it will be a lot harder to tie digital metrics to business metrics.
This is a shift that many brands are already living, as brand managers begin to move away from simply trying to grow the audience and moving into effective targeting of promotions to specific slices of that following.
Integrating social into the overall marketing mix
Marketing messaging on social now belongs to the overall mix, and not to some silo that lives outside of the organization's core marketing objectives. This is a fundamental shift, because brands initially experimented with social media by trying anything that sticks and basically trying to grab share and build audience.
As it was mostly seen as experimental, the resources were also sectioned off so as to protect the rest of the marketing engine. However, now that sort of segmentation means loss of efficacy and wasted resources, as the value of social media lies heavily in its ability to magnify a cohesive marketing initiative.
So this shift from "social" to "digital" is a vital one, as it redefines approach and broadens scope to the point that social becomes an essential tool in a larger tool kit.
Each tool must be deployed for a specific objective, as the first step to success is having the right tool to do the job — and thus find the right people for the right marketing message.
Of course, Facebook benefits here in its own redefinition. Facebook doesn't want marketers to see its platform as a digital golden bullet, as it creates inflated expectations that are near-impossible to deliver on. The social network wants its partner marketers to consider how its own offering fits into the larger picture, and not see Facebook as *the* picture itself.
Nonetheless, the platform is clearly in self-promotional mode here:
This means that it's a multi-channel world
The integration of social into the digital rubrik is a nod to the consumer's multi-channel reality.
There are no longer single channel strategies that work well in a time of omnipresent fragmentation of attention, and therefore the step from social into the wider mix of digital means that social has become another channel in a multi-channel world.
As the report states,
Companies also need to realize that digital is not a “one size fits all” channel. It’s a varied toolbox, and each company will find different tools useful for different marketing needs. This is a basic understanding that companies apply to other media, but too many still view digital media as a monolith.
They dive into channels “because they’re there”—and they don’t asses how the cost of the effort compares to the situational value each channel may offer. They end up spreading themselves thin instead of focusing on their strengths and targets by mixing some channels in the right way and skipping others altogether.
In travel, digital channels have been successful at paving the way for future revenue by building long-term goodwill with consumers. However, goodwill doesn’t enable discrete tracking of dollars, time, or effort.
The report then explains that marketers must step up to the challenge of measuring how social media interactions and engagement reap actual revenue benefits. It's no longer suitable to simply guess how much the ROI is, or ignore the various tools that exists to fold social media into a metrics-based digital marketing strategy.
In order to start using business metrics, rather than social ones such as likes and shares, the report identifies different areas of impact:
These areas of impact must then be owned by someone in the organization that can have actual control over the outcome. As mentioned earlier, the capability must not be siloed off to a social step-child, but folded into the appropriate place in the organization.
The report also suggests that the ongoing consumer acceptance of lowered privacy offers marketers a gold mine:
Almost all digital channels collect basic demographic information about their users, along with data like age, gender, geography. Many consumers reveal much more, however, including relationship status, past
travel locations, education and work history, brand preferences, leisure preferences, and income.
And then there’s the information they don’t have to choose to share—the information about location, search
histories, and buying habits that the internet catalogs regardless of whether they share it.
There are fewer limits to what some consumers are willing to share online. The data is there. The question is whether travel marketers will use it.
That is the question, indeed.
The report can be found by clicking here.
NB: Facebook image courtesy Shutterstock.