With the web waking up to the power of Facebook as a starting point for advertising and exposure, travel brands are trying everything possible to capture audiences.
The reason? Well, one piece of evidence is contained in this Hitwise chart from March 2010, shown almost every time the social network’s increasing influence on web usage needs to be demonstrated.
So the mad scramble has begun in earnest by travel brands to seize the opportunity to befriend and woo Facebookers with helpful, unusual or quirky bits of functionality contained with their fan pages.
In April 2010, KLM ran a  promotion to allow customers to design their own luggage tags via a Facebook widget. This followed the rather more serious effort by EasyJet to include a trip planning console, ahead of an ambitious booking system contained within Facebook.
The trend continues…
The UK arm of the VisitNorway DMO this week launched a promotion within Facebook to encourage users to upload photographs onto pre-set picture postcards.
The creators of the best postcards will apparently also be used for a wider multi-media marketing campaign.
Users can also share cards on their profiles (inevitably, as in this case, inviting ridicule from friends).
Jokes aside, Facebook is becoming a key battleground in the marketing world as creatives and company developers look to build functionality that engages with audiences.
In VisitNorway’s case the challenge will be in getting people to such promotions in the first place. The DMO’s page has just over 100 fans and will arguably need some serious word-of-mouth marketing to essentially justify the development of the web technology to run the postcard application.
This, in turn, begs the question as to whether Facebook’s size or usage are what makes it attractive from a marketing perspective?
amazing growth by facebook.
i am finding more and more that i use vertical search sites other than google for specific things. i.e. tripadvisor for hotel reviews, linkedin for people, youtube for vids, app store for podcosts etc
so I’d argue that google not growing much in KWS given the rise of vertical search.
be interesting to know if every time i tweet via tweetdeck to twitter and facebook, wheather that counts as visit for facebook?
also interesting to know if maps.google is included in google figures? (i reckon they aren’t which distorts the stats in facebooks facour)
steve,
tweetdeck uses twitter and fb api’s, thus not accounting for visits.
as far as i know, hitwise does collect data on subdomains seperately but i’d guess a large number of visitors to the google subdomains stems from google itself.
kevin,
actually the bigger news in my book is that fb has already surpassed the big g by around 1.5 points – although that comes to the same conclusion
As a part of our built-in marketing toolkit and social media integration on our ecommerce platform (VacationStorebuilder.com) for vacation rentals and vacation ownership, we also set up a “BOOK NOW” tab in Facebook that features specials and packages: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Silver-Lake-Resort/125771287912