Tour operators: Want more Likes on Facebook?

By Mark Frary

I am regularly asked about how travel companies can get more Likes on Facebook. You can understand why. When you go to your brand’s Facebook page, the number of Likes is front and centre. If it’s not going up then something is clearly wrong with your social media strategy, right?

Well yes and no.

Getting more likes is relatively easy. You can “buy” them. Buying them does not mean spending money with one of those companies that promises to get you more Facebook fans although they do work if that is what you are interested in. You can also spend money on a Facebook ad. In fact, Get More Likes is one of the default advertising options on Facebook. many companies use competitions and offers on their pages to gain likes although, in theory, Facebook does not permit the use of the Like button as a way of entering a competition.

But do you really want more likes? If you have “bought” your fans, how loyal are they going to be and do they really have a deep connection with your brand? I would argue that you should not be seeking more likes but rather more engagement i.e. a good relationship with your fans no matter how few of them you have. Facebook lets you measure engagement relatively easily.

It launched a measure called PTAT in October 2011. PTAT is short for People Talking About This and if you run a travel business or manage a page on their behalf, you will recognise this wording. It appears at the top of your page next to your Likes figure.

What PTAT represents is not obvious. It shows the number of unique users who do one of the following things:

• Like your Page
• Post to your Page’s Wall,
• Liking, commenting or sharing one of your updates
• Answering a question
• RSVP-ing to an event
• Mentioning your Page (but not just by name)
• Tagging a Page in a photo
• Liking or sharing a deal
• Checking in at a Place
• Writing a recommendation

These are all signs of engagement between your brand and your fans and so a higher PTAT score will mean higher engagement.

Regular users will also notice that PTAT can fluctuate wildly. That is because it is a dynamic figure that represents the number of unique users doing those actions over the previous seven days.

I actually prefer to use PTAT to calculate something even more useful - engagement rate. This is PTAT divided by your total number of fans and is expressed as a percentage. So what is a typical engagement rate? Coca Cola has 68 million likes and a PTAT of just under a million, translating to an engagement rate of 1.4%. Cadbury has 391,947 likes and a PTAT of 14,052 - an engagement rate of 3.6%.

In fact, engagement rates are typically in the low single digits and anything higher is commendable. I decided to do a short survey of 20 UK tour operators and their figures are as below:

Note that having a large number of likes does not correlate with engagement rate. Those at the left are doing best at engaging with their fans. So how do you do that? Use great photos, ask questions - anything that gets people to respond or share.

That’s all very well but why is it important. Higher engagement rates mean that your page posts will appear more often in the newsfeeds of your fans and of their friends. It is those last four words that are crucial.

So when someone says they want more likes, say yes but only after they get their engagement rate up first.