Can Social Media Lift Travel?

Another article with some more info about Expedia’s use of social media:
Expedia’s social journey into the ‘recommendation age’

It seems that the news that Expedia will launch its own social networking service is not entirely correct.

Not exactly, according to Sarah Keeling, the group’s director of integrated communications. However, while a standalone social networking service is not on the cards, there are clear plans to further integrate the business with existing social platforms. “We aren’t selling paper towels, we are selling travel which is inherently social so we really see this as good natural opportunity,” she says.

Here are some of the things that Expedia is doing with social media.

1) Engaging their clients directly on Facebook

Last year the company commissioned independent research to establish whether any correlation could be drawn between people actively engaging with Expedia on Facebook and those going on to book a holiday with the site. “We found that this was absolutely the case,” says Keeling.

2) Testing the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter to drive sales for a particular holiday destination – Las Vegas in this experiment

the company recently conducted a social media experiment using mainly Facebook and Twitter to promote Las Vegas as a holiday destination. The company declared it ‘Vegas Week’ and set about building a campaign which focused on nothing but the city...
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When it came to social media the strategy was to focus on a specific hotel each day. It used Facebook’s new Timeline – which launched around the same time - to showcase “big, beautiful photographs of hotels” and a ‘Vegas week’ Twitter hashtag to engage people for a six-hour period each day. Various competitions, which tapped into the human psyche about how people feel about Las Vegas, tested people on songs, films and facts associated with America’s most populous city.
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The campaign paid off: “When analysing the data we found that on the days the hotels were promoted each experienced year-on-year double digit growth,” Keeling says.

3) Engaging travel bloggers and the so-called “Travelrati”

These are either regular travel bloggers or those ‘travel influencers’ who know exactly where to go, where to stay and when – and are prepared to tell people about it on a forum like Twitter. Expedia has been very successful targeting this latter group; each week it has several hundred people who spend up to 90 minutes engaging with the Expedia brand about travel.
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Expedia reckons it is pretty ‘light-handed’ with bloggers; it might pay for the trip but the traveller designs his own itinerary. All they ask is that there is a pointer at the end of the story to, for example, an Expedia sale on flights to that destination.

4) Looking at the successes of other digital brands

“Amazon has done reviews incredibly well,” says Keeling. While Expedia is not quite as far down the line as the Amazon Vine selected reviewers’ programme, it has recently launched its verified reviews programme which requires that the person has booked their travel experience through Expedia.

5) Investigating the potential of Google+ and Pinterest

“There is a community there and we want to figure out how we engage it and how we exploit the search engine optimisation (SEO) potential that both those spots have,” says Keeling.

6) Investing in mobile/social integration

So when you are looking at accommodation options on a social or mobile platform, the idea would be that you would be notified if a friend had ‘liked’ a particular hotel and this would become part of the booking process. Other examples are along the following lines: if a customer has shared data about his surfing passion, Expedia could make some really smart recommendations for activities in say, Hawaii. Or if they ‘like’ Elvis on Facebook, a Las Vegas hotel featuring an Elvis show could be the ticket. “We are not there yet but the vision is to have those two things totally integrated,” says Keeling. That is still 12 to 18 months away.