Article for Wednesday, 30th of March 2011

A few years after its creation, marketers have understood the power and huge potential that Facebook represents for their business. Although the use of Facebook as a marketing tool is very recent, we can already observe an evolution in how it is used and in how it impacts sales growth and revenue.

The article "Facebook leads to hotel room revenue" explains us that Facebook is not used only for CRM any more. With the development of the e-commerce, more and more hotels for instance integrated a booking engine on their Facebook page, offering their guests an additional option and service. Has it proved successful? Certainly. For some hotels, the conversion rate on direct referrals from traveler review sites to hotel supplier websites ranged from 4% to 6% in 2009, while conversion from Facebook to hotel websites was 8%. It is of course not as well developed for all the hotels but most hotels have now realized the potential behind Facebook e-commerce and the possible impact on their revenue. Thus, many have started developing, in addition to their customer-engagement marketing, an e-commerce activity on their FB page, like Westin Hotels & Resorts in January that introduced a shop tab on its properties' FB pages.

This trend is promised to grow with currently more than 13% of social-network users using social networks to shop for travel, according to the firm’s “Traveler Technology Survey 2010. In addition,

the proportion of people talking about travel on FB with their friends and family is in constant growth as well as the travelers'engagement with the travel companies on social media.

As a result, companies and hotels are jumping quickly on this FB business and even if most hoteliers still consider that the primary purpose of the social media is to engage with their customers to build trust and loyalty, few would ignore this new way of making revenue...

Comment:

For some people, the best uses of social media are: • An important component of hotel’s multi-channel marketing • Buzz-building • Brand-building • Interacting with and engaging customers • Keeping up with the times, making the hotel look current, cool and up-to-date • Driving engaged and relevant traffic to the property’s own website.

For my part, I think that e-commerce via FB is a huge opportunity. It is clearly the future of checking-in and selling on internet. Thanks to social media like FB, you can accompany your customers from the decision to purchase to the after-sales. You can give them tips and recommendations, fix any problems that can occur after or during the sales and even upsell! All of these in a friendly and more customized way. Besides, for those who doubt the utility for FB on both of these 2 uses (CRM and e-commerce), I think they should first wonder whether they use FB the right way (do they engage with their followers regularly? post interesting contents? use the proper tone? have an attractive page? etc.) and to use their analytics to discover what the problems may be. The key is to perseverate and to remember that FB is good not only at improving your CRM, image and sales when used properly but also to improve your ranking on internet (SEO) and the possibility to find your key followers, your influencers to help you growing your community online as well as your sales.