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Safari Marketing & Social Media Strategies

Does Facebook Really Deliver?

There has been a lot of hype over Facebook lately.  Both, the good, bad, and the ugly.  With all this talk around the social media platform we felt the urge to join in on the conversation

WildWeb is here to set the record straight.  Or in more precise words, set our record straight regarding Facebook.

Why we love it:

We can grow a fan base that allows us to talk directly to a community: This community willingly follows company/organisation/place’s brand on Facebook, allowing that brand to share new buzz their fans can relate to.

Ability to create great brand awareness through social sharing: This is a nice vehicle allowing new people to discover the product, generating likely merit and good value too.

We can advertise to very specific demographic through PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising: This means we can advertise to people in specific geographic regions who have specific interests, such as people in the US region who are interested in African wildlife.  Needless to say, the CPC (Cost-per-click) on these adverts are lower than say: Google Adwords.

Why we’d think twice about it:

Facebook is often used during leisure time, or as we would call it “down time.”  This means we are using Facebook on a somewhat mindless level, where we aren’t in decision making mode, or point of transaction mentality.

This idea got us thinking…

WildWeb’s Paul told us about his “Ah-ha” moment:

“My wife and I’s 10th anniversary was quickly approaching and we wanted to plan something special, like a mini holiday. We immediately sifted through my many travel catalogues, internet websites, and a window opened to Trip Advisor. We never ever thought, “Hey lets go back to Facebook and have a look at what our friends are saying.” It never even crossed our minds. This is what brought home the idea to me that Facebook isn’t the ideal medium to start planning a trip.”

The Idea in Testing:

But of course with everything, we need to test our assumptions.  Recently what we have been doing here at WildWeb is creating events tracking within Google Analytics. An event fires off a certain action that a user does.  Event tracking is an object oriented model that allows us to collect and classify different types of interaction within a webpage.

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Here is the golden realization: We can track an event on the website where we know the user is seriously interested in engaging with the product.  In the safari travel and tourism industry, this could be the contact us page, availability calendar, or the rates page, such as Tongabezi’s below. All these pages indicate to us that the user visiting a site has serious intent in staying at a safari lodge or accommodation.

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In doing so, we can then look back at such user engagement and where our specific traffic is coming from.  What was amazing to find was that Facebook was nowhere to be found. Who delivered serious traffic you ask?  Trip Advisor, Yahoo, Bing, PPC (pay-per-click) through Google, Organic searches, agents’ sites and great travel bloggers.

Takeaway:

Facebook makes you feel warm and fuzzy inside with all the likes, comments, and shares.  But these events in Google Analytics proved there are bigger players who are creating referral traffic and conversions, such as booking a stay with Tongabezi.

Facebook is a great brand awareness tool as we mentioned in the beginning of this blog and we like it for this valuable trait. But if you think social media is the future of digital marketing, you may want to think twice.  Why? Because Google PPC, Organic search, SEO, and good content marketing are being verified and confirmed by Google Events when it comes to tracking tangible conversions.

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