Facebook Trampling on the Travel Forums

An awful lot of money is spent by individuals & companies, particularly travel/location related businesses, investing in creating small, regional-centric forums, whose sole purpose it sometimes seems is to attract a lot more moaners & groaners rather than makers & shakers…

In a Fickle World Choose the Best

The point of such forums is wasted on us at webSEOlive; why spend so much money & energy in custom-building a website/online forum when the tools are out there for you to utilise already?!   A network like Facebook can give you a dynamically increasing world of potential readers, with an established & understood interface and constantly growing fan-base, and doesn’t require you to get bogged down in the confusing world of competitive site optimisation.

Think Global to Snowball

Despite the objections of the many who rashly shy away from the supposed invasiveness & faddishness of such social media, webSEOlive do advise investing time and online marketing spend on such networks. Options such as broadcasting via a Facebook business page are a fine place to start, but really you need to learn to harness the many levels such social sites can provide your business, ensuring the experience your brand offers is shared with many rather than just a select few…

Ignoring a Market the Size of the 3rd Largest Country in the World

We do know businesses within the travel industry that still believe Facebook isn’t for them and there is no point creating a business page; there are many too whose foreign agents admit the same thing.  Ignorance kills business, and if you or the people that represent your business don’t evolve you will not compete.

Here’s the Facebook Coverage of 18-year olds + in quite important markets in March 2010.   As Toby Beresford from Nudge said, the total Facebook market is the equivalent of being the 3rd biggest country in the world; the age group that are creating the most accounts = 55+; can you afford to ignore Facebook any longer?

Facebook Demographics March 2010

Country	Facebook Users Aged 18+	Total Population
Norway	1,887,320	4,827,000
Canada	12,429,960	33,707,000
UK	20,554,740	61,823,000
USA	102,160,860	306,805,000
Sweden	2,783,960	9,288,000
Finland	1,318,520	5,339,000
France	13,563,440	62,621,000
Italy	12,748,640	60,274,000
Turkey	15,798,020	74,816,000
Spain	8,272,300	46,916,000
Portugal	1,530,340	10,639,000
Netherlands	1,904,840	16,527,000
Germany	6,447,400	81,980,000
Japan	881,760	127,568,000
Russia	759,780	141,839,000

Coverage of Adults Aged 18+ Nationally using Facebook
Population Statistics for Middle 2009, provided by The Population Reference Bureau - http://www.prb.org