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Sunday, April 25, 2010

Travel Brands Engagement in Various Social Media

On March, I did a research on travel brands in Asia concerning their behaviour in social media like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Myspace, and Youtube; and whether they have a blog site as well. So I started to look for hotels and then airlines. First it was fun reading their profiles, posts and updates. But when I found that the search result esp. in Facebook, showing hundreds of them, took me almost a lifetime to configure out which one is official or personal. Eventually I got the accurate numbers. The pain didn't stop here.

Decided to narrow down the search into 1 month backward, I collected each profiles activities in various social media. Unfortunately Facebook didn't have the functionality to show # of posts (unlike Twitter), so I did it manual - using my finger (felt stupid pointing at the monitor, counting while other hand scrolling the cursor up & down). Some were highly active in updating their accounts (such as Airasia), while some were not (such as Singapore Airlines).

I found that 90% of travel brands in Asia have Facebook page, followed by Twitter and Flickr, Youtube and LinkedIn. Hi5 is the least popular among them. It is amazing that most travel brands also have multiple profiles in Facebook. Usually each profile is to promote different product or country (such as Shangri-La and Mandarin Oriental Hotels).

For full analysis and lesson learned, you can download the Travel Brand Engagement Report here.