UGH – the word “engagement”, indeed, will make me rant. Pardon me. A TNooz article quotes Facebook Travel,  “a team lead for the travel vertical in Facebook said that the travel industry is lagging behind other industries in maximizing the power of the social networking site for marketing messages”. That’s disappointing they think that. But maybe it’s not me, it’s you….

 

Enjoy exploring this page, yourselves: https://www.facebook.com/deals/checkin/business/

 

See this is the disconnect with Facebook, and real business. Real business needs to make sense of real dollars, and don’t really get “engagement”. You can’t just say things and hope they mean something when your infrastructure is broken. I have drunk the social kool-aid 100%. Review sites have upended traditional marketing models, and how operations steers the ship. It’s more revolutionary than the printing press, in many ways. We have a networked superconsciousness now, and we all have almost ESP like access to each other’s information.

But for Facebook to talk about “engagement” as a currency, when it just, truly, does not exist on Facebook (yet?), is dense. It’s a bad move for them – I have talked about all their bad moves, ad naseoum, and am beginning to wrap it up. I imagine I am not the only industry person who will have this point of view. If you don’t, then explain why Facebook chastises our industry, where marketing features like Check-Ins that they claim they are “committed to” offer zero help, broken videos, and links to dead guides (especially funny as the “how to do facebook check-ins” guide links to a pitch black page, a literal black hole, if you will.<br/>
fb wrong

UPDATE: It now leads to a “This page doesn’t exist” link.

For Facebook, I think it’s too late. That spontaneous press conference to announce social graph search (unavailable but to .01% of users, and slow to roll out, taking years?) seemed a bit spontaneous in lieu of losing 1.4 million users in the US and 600,000 in the UK, last December alone.

It seems to be a desperate way to keep people’s attention.

But we all know how silent that world of Facebook has been recently. Updates, changes, settings confusion, privacy confusion, purges. That’s lost some people, for others – there’s only so much you can know about people you know. We all know how frustrated we are with the site. The unstable, complex architecture –  it’s exhausting to keep up with, for those that haven’t already given up.

“Engagement” hasn’t meant anything there, and now it’s just storytelling with pictures.  Building brand, slowly, with little cost, *is* valuable, but we shouldn’t overvalue it. Definitely not on this website. The fact is, it’s a closed system, so it may end up irrelevant. Twitter, alone, is concierge services, storytelling, a telephone, service recovery, a Q&A platform, and more. It’s far more useful. Google Plus is heading in that direction too, with the marketing capabilities of hangouts, it’s amazing.

However we end up measuring “engagement”, there’s almost none of it on Facebook for most smaller travel brands. If you crunch the numbers of likes and comments on most major brands, it’s approximately .00005% engagement of their “liked” fan base.

A huge issue, and a metric I am waiting for from Facebook, is how many people have liked your page, and subsequently hidden your page. I think that is really important. How much of our audience is even really there? How many hotels overposted or were too self absorbed early on in their Facebook page career, and were hidden by most of their “liked” users? (I wasn’t – I treated posting like an email database, and wanted to make sure not to overuse).

That surely should be known, though, as Facebook keeps talking about “engagement” as transaction. Engagement isn’t the same on Facebook, all the while it happens everywhere else: Tripadvisor, Yelp, Travel Forums, Twitter, Google+. Hotels are engaged ***everywhere***. It’s not that our industry isn’t doing it right, on Facebook. It’s …. just….. that …… it’s …… Facebook.

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