When I was meeting with the online directors of European DMO’s, we all agreed none of us will have a website 10 years from now. Why wait? Smaller city or community DMO’s often run great websites with very little traffic. Small budgets and a lack of expertise makes website maintenance, content management and online marketing a challenge.

These DMO’s should open up shop within Facebook instead. Facebook has 400M users and is still growing. Your consumers are effectively all on Facebook. Go where your consumers are, by creating a Fanpage:

• It allows you to do pretty much anything you do with your own website from a content perspective. And it comes with build-in apps for things like blogs, photo galleries, events calendar and more.
• You can engage consumers by allowing them to like, post and comment on your content and engage in other ways.
• Once somebody becomes a fan of your page, you can market to that person in a way that’s better than email marketing.
  • Anything you post shows up on your fan’s newsfeed, potentially triggering a repeat visit. It can also be read by your fans friends, this can lead to a new visitor
  • Any engagement on your fanpage by your fans will be displayed on your fan’s friends newsfeed, also a potential for new visitors to your fanpage
• You can run promotions and sweepstakes within Facebook (although this is getting more difficult)
• A fanpage can be indexed by Google, you can still get organic search engine traffic to your page
• Facebook gives you great analytics and insights about your Fanpage and fanbase
• Facebook allows you to laserpoint your advertising on Facebook; allowing you to cost effectively find your target audience

Most of the above is free.

As a small DMO, should you shut your website down tomorrow? No, but you you start taking your Facebook Fanpage seriously and start using it strategically today and it could be your primary channel sooner than you think.