This is the fifth post in a series of ideas that Rodney shared at SoMeT.

TripAdvisor reviews are really important for hotels and accommodation providers.  The better your reviews, the more exposure you get to the c50 million visitors that TripAdvisor’s gets each month. We’ve worked with hotels that can track a direct correlation between room bookings and their ranking on TripAdvisor.  If there property falls by one place, they see an instant drop in bookings.

I’ve spoken to a hotel in Seattle who is part of a large chain.  They get one million people through their door each year but have less than 200 reviews on TripAdvisor.  Something doesn’t add up.

On Facebook, users can click ‘Like’ on a business’ Fan Page.  It’s most likely that people will stay in touch with a business after they’ve experienced what the business has to offer.  It’s also pretty likely that they’ll love what you have to offer.  It would be really great to see businesses engaging Facebook Fans to write positive reviews on TripAdvisor.  After all, you already know that they ‘Like’ you.

This is the fourth post in a series of ideas that Rodney shared at SoMeT.

A Facebook page is a great place to grow a community of people who love you.  The most effective strategy isn’t to grow a massive number of fans and then broadcast to them.  People tune out spam and Facebook filters information by determining who engages (clicks like or comments) with which Pages.

The best way to use Facebook is to grow a community of people who love what you offer.

On TripAdvisor, people can write reviews of tourism accommodation and businesses.  The majority of these posts are positive.  Each business has the ability to respond to these reviews by setting up an account. Best practice for reputation management is to respond to each and every review. It’s important to respond to people who’ve taken the time to give you feedback.  If someone comes to your customer service counter, you don’t stand there and stare at them. You engage them in conversation.

It’s also important to remember not to focus on the negative reviews.  If you ignore the positive reviews you can quickly begin to look defensive. It’s important to be conversational and human.

The people who take the time out to right positive reviews must really love what a business does. You’ve positively affected them enough that they remember to go online and take time out of their day to tell the world how great you are.

You should thank them.  Better still, why not invite them to come and join your Facebook Page so you can stay in touch.  These people could become your best advocates and most engaged fans.

If a tourism business doesn’t have time to maintain their own Fan Page properly, you can always send them to the destination’s page.

It sounds time consuming, but in reality most businesses only have a few hundred reviews in total.

Are you responding to all of your reviews?

This is the third post in a series of ideas that Rodney shared at SoMeT.

There aren’t many opportunities as powerful as the targeting available through Facebook ads .  The demographic and interest-based targeting is almost unparalleled.

You can target an ad using traditional demographics like age, gender and location.  However you can also get more detailed and dabble in psychographics like sexual orientation, marital status or where someone went to college.  One of the most powerful tools available is targeting Facebook users’ interests – ie what they ‘Like’.

You can run ads for a variety of objectives:

1. Acquisition: One of the best ways to use Facebook ads is to grow fans for your destination or business. Make sure you’re acquiring the right fans – people who love you – rather than people who clicked ‘Like’ to win a competition or for special offer.  If you have a budget for this, spend it all at once. There’s not much to be gained by spreading it out over time.  The trick, though, is to manage the community carefully once you’ve got fans so that you don’t disengage people. This takes skill and experience.  If you do it well, you have a cash cow of advocates that you can rely on for web traffic, referrals and feedback that can offer value for the life time of your fans.

2. Engagement: Facebook offers a Sponsored Stories promotion that allows Fan Page owners to promote specific conversations in news feeds.  This is a great way to get extra exposure for a particular topic or offer.  It also helps to bump up engagement on the page and can lead to some organic fan acquisition.

3. Traffic: You can use Facebook ads to send users to anywhere on the web.  I’d recommend against linking outside of Facebook but you can use ads to drive to a competition, custom tab or application quite effectively. Generally speaking, Facebook users like to stay in the Facebook platform.

We’re seeing prices increase steadily and expect this trend to continue.  At the moment, the value that Facebook’s ad platform offers is a bargain.  As large media budgets shift towards digital in the coming months and years, they’ll force up bid prices for the same eyeballs.

Read SoMeT Idea #2: Fish where the fish are: TripAdvisor