By the end of the webinar, you will understand how you can attract fans and convert them into bookings from Facebook.

You will learn:

  • Why Facebook is a big deal for tour operators
  • How to engage with your Facebook fans
  • How to get bookings from Facebook

Facebook is an extremely important tool that you can use to build awareness of your products, engage with your customers and increase your bookings.

Why is Facebook Important?

Facebook is a social network, but that does not mean at all that it can’t help you run your business. Many other travel brands have found that their bookings increased because of their presence on social media websites.

It’s Where the People Are

Think about how many friends you have on Facebook. Then think about how many friends they would have on Facebook that you perhaps don’t know, and then their friends, and so on and so on. The point is: as of September 2016, Facebook has an average of 1.18 billion daily users. That is a ridiculously huge number of people and, with your Facebook presence, each of them is theoretically a potential customer at your doorstep.

Influence

Word-of-mouth is like advertising on steroids. It conveys information about your business from one person to another but with one key difference to advertising: people actually believe it. Facebook is an extremely valuable source of word-of-mouth reviews, and these are very influential over people’s decision-making process. 87% of people aged under 34 use Facebook to solicit advice before making a decision, so if you can make sure that your business is receiving positive reviews, you can convert more visitors to your page into customers.




get good reviews bookings from facebook




How Can I Use Facebook for my Business?

There are three main ways you can use Facebook for your business:

Build Awareness

Facebook is a platform for sharing information – people go there to find out about things so the information you provide will be their first port of call when they are trying to make a decision. This means that you should provide a positive view of your business. You can do this by sharing some of the experiences that others have had through photos and videos. These make for very engaging content that captures people’s attention and can go a really long way towards selling your products.

Educate Your Visitors

A good way to use Facebook to engage your potential customers is to educate them. This usually takes the form of posts in which you share some light-hearted ‘fun facts’ to showcase your knowledge and give people a reason to keep coming back to your page. These posts also demonstrate that you care about your community.

Other posts you can make that demonstrate that you care about your community are posts showing you interacting with your community. The example in the webinar is of a photo of helicopter tour using their company helicopter to help drop water on a bushfire. These posts create a lot of goodwill for your company because it shows that you are willing to take an active role in your community, rather than existing purely to make profit.

Public Service Announcement-style posts are also very valuable in educating your customers and building a positive image of yourself with them. A very Australian example of this is a country home rental company putting out a post warning their guests of the dangers of kangaroos coming out to eat near the side of the road at dusk and reminding them to drive carefully. The information in these posts helps to demonstrate the company’s knowledge, as well as to impart information that their likely predominantly city-dwelling consumers might not know or think of unprompted. It makes your customers feel valued because it demonstrates that you as a business care about them personally.

Reviews

Adding a Reviews section to your Facebook page is a great way to engage in a bit of shameless self-promotion. If someone gives you some positive feedback, or your company reaches a milestone of some sort, share it! Our example in the webinar is of a walking tour in Melbourne that reached the #1 ranking on TripAdvisor. They elected to share this news with their customers and visitors to their page because it helps to build a trusting relationship.

Integrating Rezdy to get Bookings from Facebook

Rezdy lets you get bookings from Facebook by adding a ‘Book Now’ button directly to your page.

You can enter the link to your Facebook account under ‘Settings – Company Information’ within Rezdy. Once that’s done, you simply go to the list of Rezdy Apps, scroll down the list until you find Facebook and click ‘Install.’ Once that has installed, go to Settings and add your page to the app. If you look at your Facebook page afterwards, you’ll notice a ‘Book Now’ button has appeared under the profile picture.

You can of course customize your ‘Book Now’ button so it fits properly with your colour scheme and branding. Facebook gives you the option to do this.

For other tips about selling on Facebook and other social media platforms, download the Rezdy Social Media ebook.

 


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