Monetizing Your Facebook Likes | Travel Research Online

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Monetizing Your Facebook Likes

How can we place a value on a “Like”? My own experience confirms what others say: it is difficult to properly assess the value of a “Like”. The standard measurement of dollars resulting from a customer reaction to an advertisement does not seem to apply. It is almost always impossible to trace back any given sale of our services to an interaction with a Facebook post or ad.

We really should not be surprised, however. Calculating Return on Investment (ROI) is easier with advertising than with marketing, and Facebook is actually a marketing venue, not an advertising venue. The distinction between marketing and advertising is always important to understand, and perhaps more so with digital marketing than with any other media. In setting goals for marketing your travel practice, the bottom line is always how many sales you make. How many people utilize your services as a result of your marketing efforts? This year’s revenue over last year’s revenue. New sales versus repeat business.

What is definitively true is the necessity for growth. We operate our businesses from a sieve – we lose a few clients every year to calamities of every type. To grow, we need to both replace the clients we lose AND add clients to increase our year over year revenue. To do so, we have to expand our “circle of influence.” Every new client we bring on has their own acquaintances, family and close friends. The deeper we can penetrate those veins, the more likely we are to add new clients.


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Facebook excels in its ability to mine new spheres of influence.

A Like on Facebook is the end result of great content which results in lots of Likes and Shares. When we achieve engagement, we increase the loyalty of our existing Fans and influence their Friends, increasing their incremental commercial value to our travel practice. Can we measure the value of the engagement we generate?

Instinctively I know the value is there. Better minds than mine have tried to quantify the value: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Presentations_Whitepapers/2011/The_Power_of_Like_How_Brands_Reach_and_Influence_Fans_Through_Social_Media_Marketing

Here’s what I do know. I have 13,270 people on Facebook who have “Liked” Travelhoppers. The Friends of those Likes number 6,328,284 people.

What is the value of a like? I don’t know with any degree of precision. But numbers like those above encourage me to continue to try and figure it out.

This week, we will be addressing more Facebook strategies and tactics.

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