Facebook’s next travel moves

After revelations at WTM, Euromonitor International asks if Facebook is set to become a key player in the travel sector. Travel and tourism analyst Angelo Rossini investigates.

"Lee McCabe, global head of travel at Facebook, recently revealed at WTM London the next developments involving the social media giant and the travel industry.

So far, Facebook has been considered a great tool to engage customers over the long term, but less effective in terms of generating bookings over the short term. Another key issue for Facebook advertising has always been the difficulty in calculating return on investment. According to McCabe, this is currently changing due to the more sophisticated targeting of users, which is now possible on Facebook.

Sophisticated targeting – reaching the people that matter

We asked McCabe about the capability of Facebook to move beyond its obvious effectiveness in the long term to also become an important platform for the generation of short-term bookings. His answer was that this is now the case thanks to the current sophistication of Facebook’s targeting tools.

A tool certainly addressing this issue is Facebook Exchange, which, thanks to cookies from partner websites, provides Facebook with information on the products recently searched by its users, making it possible to target them through personalised advertisements, the benefit being the possibility to retarget people within minutes of their search for a particular product.

Another important development in terms of increasing Facebook’s ability to generate travel bookings is the possibility to use it in conjunction with companies’ customer databases. Big data is today one of the buzzwords in the travel industry and rightly so given its importance. Facebook currently allows companies to make more efficient use of big data, cross-checking it with its own user data. Facebook Custom Audiences lets advertisers find their customers among people who are on Facebook in order to reach them through targeted advertisements. The possibility to target the company’s customers and in a personalised way, possibly based on their recent internet activities, indeed sounds quite powerful.

Graph Search – the power of connections

The next step in this effort from Facebook to make the most of social connections for marketing purposes will be Graph Search. This new concept of a social search engine is currently only available in beta version in the US and McCabe was not able to announce a date for its full implementation. Its peculiarity is due to the fact that search results will not be mainly based on relevance, as with Google results, but social connections will have a strong impact on them. For example, a user searching for a hotel in Paris will see prioritised hotels at which his/her friends stayed or which they "liked" on Facebook.

Only the next months and years will tell if Facebook’s new and more sophisticated targeting functionalities and use of social connections will be able to drive the rise of a third "social" pillar for online travel service advertising besides search engines and metasearch travel sites."