travel sites sm review 040811

Social Networking Overview

Prepared for: TravelHouse re: Antarcticabound.com / Arcticbound.com / Villaretreats.com

Prepared by: Nick Thomas

4 August 2011

Jan Klin & Associates Charnwood, Hollow Lane, Kingsley, Cheshire WA6 8EF T 01928 788 100 E [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


About Antarctica Bound / Arctic Bound / VillaretreatsAntarcticabound.com, arcticbound.com and villaretreats.com are part of the specialist travel portfolio at TravelHouse.

Antarcticabound.com and arcticbound.com are experienced in the Polar cruise travel market and Villaretreats.com offer the

finest selection of luxury villas to rent.

Current Social Networking ActivityAll 3 websites promote active Facebook and Twitter presences, but are underdeveloped in a vibrant social media niche.

This Brief Overview Will...Summarise the opportunity and reasons to invest and then broadly outline an approach to develop active and useful social

network presences: setting the objectives to desired outcomes, choosing the right channels, designing profiles and content

strategies, building and promoting the presences, generating engagement and measuring success. There is also a brief case

study to demonstrate the potential of a well planned, executed and managed social strategy




1. The Opportunity - Why Invest in Social Networking?Social networking has revealed a new way of navigating the internet. Businesses can connect to customers virally, and users

can find high quality approved content and recommendations. Ultimately businesses must go where their customers are and

this is increasing where the social networks are but businesses must be clear about their business objectives.

Crucially, social media is already an interwoven part of the online travel industry. According to a recent US study:

• 7% of traffic to travel sites already come from social media, but more interestingly,

• for 90% of sites, social media was a top destination site after visiting their site (11% of downstream traffic overall)

• where sites allow user reviews, there was a 24% increase in traffic

This indicates how people use social media when researching, choosing and booking travel online.

Facebook & Twitter

Facebook is by far the most popular social network in the

UK, accounting for 53% of all visits to social networks, 29m

active users averaging 68 visits per month and 30 minutes per

visit.

Twitter is far smaller but growing much more quickly. It allows the

quick proliferation of content to a network of followers and while

Facebook continues to revolve around real world relationships,

Twitter ties people together in a much more casual way.

YouTube

20% of all social visits. 3rd largest website in the UK (behind

Google UK and Facebook) with a nearly 1/3 of the visits Google

UK receives. Obvious application to showcase destinations.

Tumblr & Flickr

Photo-sharing applications: natural application for travel industry. Helps with SEO and visibility.

Blogs

User-experience and reviews are potentially powerful sources of traffic and new business.

Costs & Risk

Successful application costs in terms of time, resource and training / expertise / education. There are risks from the

transparency and easy proliferation of content which need to be managed through clear usage and engagement policies.

Some Reasons to Invest

Social media, in all its forms, provide a way for users to deliver ‘word of mouth’ marketing, acknowledged as one of the big-

gest influencers when it comes to consumers making travel decisions. Many potential objectives are achievable using social

networking tools, but crucially, these should be aligned with the company’s wider business strategy. TravelHouse are possi-

bly most suited to using social networks to i) reach a new audience; ii) capture potential customer data; iii) create brand loy-

alty; iv) increase brand awareness; v) increase brand advocacy; vi) increase brand engagement; vii) communicate with cus-

tomers.




2. Committing to a Social Media Strategy• A fully committed and solid strategy is important: light experimentation is highly likely to be ineffective. The mistake many

businesses make is ‘wanting to be on Facebook’ before deciding on the business goals.

• Start with a social media strategy with an overall plan not a technology or tool. In other words, choose the correct social

media channel for the desired outcome.

• A roadmap is built by tailoring your objectives to an audience and using specific tactics as part of a wider strategy

designed to achieve those objectives. The channel / tools / technology can then be appropriately selected and measured.

• Critical mass is important. A tentative and short term approach may deliver a few thousand ‘Likes’, ‘Followers’ or

‘Subscribers’ but these are unlikely to produce meaningful business results. Scale is necessary to generate consistent and

visible engagement and interaction which is then measurable. Growing the required critical mass is an investment.

3. Executing a Social Media PlanChoosing and defining the appropriate strategy is only the first stage. It is then important to design, build and use the

channels in the appropriate way before you can expect meaningful results.

This should involve the following stages:

A. Design & Content

Social networks each have their own specific means of configuration allowing the tool to be used in the most

effective way. Similarly, the way community users digest and absorb content differs from channel to channel, so the

right content strategy is also important. The right channels need to be chosen for the business objectives and then

best practices need to be adopted and set up appropriately with this and the business objectives in mind.

B. Building and Promoting

Building a community that matters relies on an understanding of how to use the various tools that each social

network makes available. Interaction / participation is key to raise visibility and begin attracting the right network.

C. Generating Engagement

A network is only meaningful if it interacts / engages with your content. Each social network offers different

methods to communicate with your networks and applying appropriate techniques will help generate the types of

engagement that matter

D. Measuring Success

It is impossible to predict accurately how any particular social network will react to these initiatives. A critical part to

developing a solid strategy is a feedback loop that applies learned lessons from using the network. It is key to

determine measurement of the desired outcomes, monitor progress and continually improve the configuration and

content strategies




4. How it’s doneSTA Travel UK are a great example of how to exploit social media in the travel industry. They have over 80,000 Facebook

‘Likes’ and over 4,000 Followers on Twitter. Most ingeniously though, they have developed a travel blogging application on

their website which allows anyone to blog their travel exploits as they go, allowing photo, video and message-sharing within



the suite. This is not only an invaluable tool for the traveller to keep in touch with loved-ones, it’s an awesome advocacy

device as it creates endless fresh, targeted content which ultimately promotes the company’s products. This social

application has been so successful that 15-20% of all traffic to the STA Travel website now arrives via a customer’s travel

blog: http://blogs.statravel.co.uk/sarahfrodsham/blog/thailand/ban-haygo

Notice how STA do not lose sight of the need to make the application commercial. Neatly injected into the user’s blog is a

targeted product promotion which does not feel aggressive or in any way detract from the usefulness of the wider initiative.

This tool is also integrated with Facebook meaning that all users’ blog posts are automatically posted to their Facebook feed

for all their Facebook Friends to see and share. On average Facebook users are connected to 140 friends, so the 80,000

strong network potentially reaches over 11m like-minded users.


http://blogs.statravel.co.uk/sarahfrodsham/blog/thailand/ban-haygo

http://blogs.statravel.co.uk/sarahfrodsham/blog/thailand/ban-haygo



The Facebook presence itself is well designed and executed. The default landing page has a strong promotion and call to

action to incentivise a connection with the brand via the social utility:




There is an active discussion board and the

photos application is very well used. Both act

to create and proliferate free marketing

material to targeted customers and their

connections.




Again, STA do not lose sight

of the need for its social

media efforts to be

commercial in nature. There

are specific landing pages for

finding a ‘quote’ and

promoting the best deals:




STA’s Twitter presence is equally well executed. Background and profile pic are well chosen and they have reached a decent

sized follower base of 4,000 and these followers are engaged enough to produce a meaningful and active conversation that




is regularly updated. The stream of tweets is varied and commercial promotions with links are neatly interspersed with brand

testimonials and positive feedback and real customer correspondence:


