I love Facebook…for personal use. It’s a great way for me to stay in touch with friends and family around the world. Its media sharing tools have greatly improved over the last few years, and it has taken the place of the majority of my personal email.
So why don’t I like Facebook for hotel marketing? Because I look at the numbers, and it’s not effective in generating new bookings. Most hotels we’ve worked with at Gradigio achieve much higher ROI from other social media networks.
With that in mind, there are a couple cases when Facebook may be a viable marketing option for your organization.
1) If you’re a hostel or targeting the under-30 crowd. In social media marketing, it’s all about demographics. You need to know who your target audience is, and then build a presence on those networks. Facebook has grown from the days when you needed an academic email address to join, but it remains a younger network. Quantcast shows 78% of the sites’ users are under 34 years old. If you are a luxury leisure property, this probably isn’t the place to be.
Chart courtesy of Quantcast.com
2) If you’re a larger hotel chain looking to build an application. Several travel companies have built very successful apps for the Facebook platform that spread quickly virally. But due to development cost and market size, this would only work well if you have a number of properties over a large geographic area. Users won’t install an app from one hotel unless it helped them elsewhere.
Recent updates in the Facebook interface have made the platform more conducive to the real-time sharing of information and media. This is a positive development for hotel marketers, but the platform still remains not the best time investment for most properties.
Hotels can achieve higher ROI by focusing on social media networks that reach potential guests in the decision making stage of the buying cycle. Not many travel planners use Facebook in their research process. They do check guest-written hotel reviews and user-produced media. Efforts to cultivate those are much more effective.
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Hi Josiah,
Nice article
I totally understand you point of view, even though I would consider cases like ours, Tiara Hotels & Resorts. We’re a recently created 5 Star Luxury chain, with no more than a year. Our strategy of promotion in the social media enviroment is no more than “to get outside”, “to be visible” and to try to reach to more and more potencial clients.
Beside our offline Marketing campaings and actions, the social media networks able us with a cost of ZERO to somehow influence and engage more people to get to know our brand/name as well as our hotel, and their locations.
We’ve a facebook fan page that is still starting. Personally I share the same opinion than you, Facebook isn’t the best tool to generate more reservations. But in the sameway that you become a fan of anything, you also can be a fan of Tiara Hotels & Resorts, and with that, your friends and connections will get to know us.
And actually there are some booking engines that are starting to implement facebook apps that able the hotels to know if the client has a facebook profile or not. This will be a great direct marketing tool.
Cheers!
Hi Josiah
I think facebook business pages should be on the portfolio of Social Media sites that Hotels use. I disagree that this is for a younger crowd, one of our Resort clients facebook page has 60% over 35years old. Interestingly enough 70% are women.
Too many times I see Facebook pages being too dormant. Hotel staff should be involved, upload photos, videos, create events and make sure that this is another place for your guests to leave a review or offer feedback.
Facebook have recently updated their pages to act more like profiles, which I think is a good thing as you can now track activity easier.
Another point is that Facebook Business pages get indexed in Google’s search results so make sure you link to your Facebook page.
JB
Social Media marketing is about the conversation and if
Thank you both for your comments. I know Facebook can be used to communicate with guests and build your web presence, I just don’t think it’s the most efficient way of doing that.
@Nuno – I’m not yet convinced that this type of awareness will increase reservations. I have hundreds of Facebook ‘friends’ and most of them are fans of several organizations. Am I aware when they become a fan of a new business? Usually not. Does it influence my travel plans? Never. But that’s an interesting development regarding the booking engines. I think there will be more and more cross-platform sharing in the future.
@John – Yes, business pages should be in the portfolio of any social media marketer…just maybe lower down in priority. I also agree that if Facebook is going to be used, it needs interaction. Thanks for sharing your resort client example. There are older people using Facebook, and if your target demographic uses it – then by all means you need to be there.
I think it is a great thought, and well done for saying so.
Personally, I think you *need* to be there… set up a page, add some nice content, and let people chit chat about how they wistfully remember their time, or look forward to their next stay. I don’t see much activity, but it is there. What’s more your link is out there a bit more on a high pageranked site, so it helps a bit with SEO. What’s more, you end up having a way for guests or fans or general public to reach you…. at least there’s that.
But I ran some low level ad experiments with some fairly reputable boutique hotels I work with, and the results of FB “highly targeted” marketing with their ad model was… I mean… laughable. People just don’t click on internet ads anymore. There is actually something called “banner blindness” to the ad guys.
Only when I stopped trying to promote it and let them sit, organically get discovered, and now have 100’s of fans.
But still…. they don’t actually *DO* anything. They don’t interact in meaningful ways. They certainly don’t book rooms off the FB page. They might book elsewhere, then chat about their next stay on FB…. but there isn’t any meaningful traffic through to the booking engine, to say the least.
I wouldn’t spend a dime, but I think you need to at least have a page there. Just let it reinforce the brand, be another place with your link, and another point of accessibility for guests.
Great article. Thanks for the thoughts. This had been back in my mind for a bit I think. A few months ago I was thinking they might play a big role, but boy that fell apart fast. =) I just don’t see it as something functional. It is a closed network, and there is little to no interaction, you know?
Great article. And I completely agree with you. I’m not entirely convinced that social marketing has much potential for the hospitality industry just as yet. You can setup blogs and pages of any number of social media sites, but it wont convert to business because most people are interested in themselves, rather than whats happening at a hotel.
The only social media (if you can call it that) that hotels should be looking hard is TripAdvisor. Now that’s an investment that WILL pay off.
Rohit Seth
Graytown Hospitality Marketing
http://www.hrabaconsulting.com/blog/2009/04/27/facebook-for-hotels-what-are-we-trying-to-achieve-so-far-seems-to-be-nothing/ Check out my new article. I think I am done with FB for now. I just don’t see anything worthwhile or meaningful at all. Actually, it is to be blamed for my entire lost morning.. I should be doing something meaningful like publicly replying to all the TA and Yelp reviews!
agreed but the key point about facebook is that its demographic is changing. More and more businesses are creating facebook pages and inviting fans from all walks of live and all ages.
We just launched a facebook bookings application for hotels – Facebook fans and potential guest can see rooms, photos, rates – get quotes and book online
live example see http://www.facebook.com/pages/arcresBookings/76837318113?v=box_3&viewas=592900427
Ian R Clayton. We have just created a page. How to add this application to our profile? Thanks
Olga
I work in social media strategy and I wanted to point out that your numbers are slightly jilted. You’re looking a compete so you’re getting the average UMVs and a breakdown of those by age, sex, etc. but that doesn’t accurately reflect the make-up of Facebook or the make-up of those who spend money on Facebook.
You can get data on the break down of Facebook members from Inside Facebook and they tell a different story: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/03/25/number-of-us-facebook-users-over-35-nearly-doubles-in-last-60-days/
That data is a couple months old but the point is that the demographics of Facebook is changing, older audiences are growing and becoming more savvy, and any travel and tourism that ignores this is going to miss the boat.