Travel Industry Could Find Real Value In Social Networks

Social networks have leapt from a technology to a social phenomenon.

Hotel referrals from social networks growing rapdily

Hotel referrals from social networks growing rapdily

Traffic to these sites – including the popular Facebook – is up 60 percent in the past year, with 2.5 billion visits logged in February 2009 alone.

Helping to drive the growth are older age groups, whose imaginations have been captured by the ease of connecting to friends online. In the past year, baby boomers (45 years and older) have flocked to Facebook and other sites faster than their younger peers.

With all this attention, it makes sense that companies will eventually find ways to benefit from social networks through the placement of advertising and marketing.

It is not surprising to me that the travel industry might be the first. The business is certainly in the right spot to try. According to Compete, referrals from social networks to hotel websites are up 151 percent since February 2008.

And why not? What better way to get a hotel suggestion than ask a friend?

The challenge is figuring out how to capitalize. Traditional ads flogging an inn or resort might be easily overlooked. Creativity will be needed, such as offering coupons for future travel to site members who describe trips (and accommodations) they enjoyed.

The benefits might be considerable. According to Compete, the conversion rate for hotel referrals from social networking sites is growing rapidly as well: up 98 percent since last year.

3 Responses to Travel Industry Could Find Real Value In Social Networks

  1. Dalaman says:

    Finally someone who can write a good blog ! I loved your post and will be telling others about it. Subscribing to your RSS feed now. Thanks

  2. yes, I am agree with your point. Social networking will really help travel business to get better traffic :)

  3. Why NUVIGIL builds on the success of Modafinil…

    General Information on Nuvigil and Modafinil I think many of us have already experienced conditions of recurring sleepiness during the day……

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 32 other followers