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.
Don't throw out the baby with the bath water. I think a better approach is to use Facebook, Twitter, blogs as part of a Web 2.0 Presence to “pull” visitors to the web site. Facebook may be hot today, but now tomorrow. The end game is to put heads in beds, napkins in laps, etc. I have hot seen a Facebook booking engine that will do that. A good website will employ a Content Management System (CMS) to ensure non-technical people can add content. With automation it is easy to post on multiple places (Facebook, Twitter, website) in one operation.
Great post William!
I've grappled with this issue for a long time. For a small DMO, I believe Oceanside Tourism's http://www.VisitParksvilleQualicumBeach.com is one of the more robust destination websites out there. We use Twitter as a word of mouth traffic generator to our website. I've chosen not to do Facebook mostly due to lack of resources, like you mention. Our small DMO team doesn’t have time to keep our site current, tweet, and duplicate many of these efforts on Facebook.
DMO member promotion is the biggest reason why I doubt Facebook will ever replace our website or those of other small DMOs.
A main reason for small businesses to join DMOs is to get exposure from the destination website. I don’t believe that Facebook has functionality for DMOs to manage member “inventories”.
Member profiles on our site include contact info, Google maps, and tripadvisor widgets. Profile info is also used in other sections of the website to populate web specials and comparison grids. These profiles are member managed which makes the process even more complex and unlikely to be offered by Facebook.
As stakeholder-based small DMO would be in a better position to use Facebook as its main web presence because it doesn’t rely on the revenue or have the related commitment to provide continuous exposure to paid members.
Great discussion to be had over a pint sometime!
Facebook is fast becoming the center of the universe. If resources aren't an issue then having a Facebook presence and your own site makes sense. If you have a limited budget, Facebook Pages let you tap into the viral channels very inexpensively.
Here's an interesting article from Inside Facebook about a study done by Rice University. Turns out that a Facebook Fan Page can increase sales… http://tiny.cc/vfJx2
Everything online needs to be measureable; measure the reach and length of time that people are spending on your website compared to Facebooks’? 400 million people are using Facebooks website, North American's average 30 minutes a day of Facebook, Canadians are the heaviest users of facebook per capita in the world and by volume the USA populations uses Facebook the most. Both the US and Canada surely are key target markets for the majority of DMO's in the world.
To start a page in facebook as a DMO is free, something that your website developer could not do. It also has the viral aspects that assists your content spread through social media platform, something that a website can not do. That is why such widgets like flickr, youtube and twitter have all made facebook applications of their products.
Although I agree that websites are very useful tools in online marketing. Facebook has the ability to drive traffic to specific conversion landing pages on your DMO websites to shorten the booking process.
Although one comment is correct, at the end of the day it is all about bums in seats, napkins in laps for DMO's but if you are not accessing all platforms for your organization then you will get left behind by rival DMO’s. I would rather see DMO's bring individual operators under there FB pages, as a show of strength than random small sites and fanpages.
Wow, great comments. Thanks. I'll share some more thoughts in more posts. Facebook is not going anywhere any time soon and through apps anything is possible, including transaction and member promotion.
One thing to clarify is that when I say 'small DMO', I might mean 'tiny'. The ones with just a couple of people and very small budgets. In that case I would seriously consider Facebook. And if you're larger, you still need to start.
Great blog…great discussion. We recently released our new microsite, http://www.AdventureCentralNewfoundland.ca, and have received more referrals from facebook and twitter than any other website.
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