Optimise, optimise, optimise and the conversions will come, says Flightcentre

Many will see social media as being about “customer love and grooviness” but in the end it is about KPIs and delivering returns, says FlightCentre. Pamela Whitby reports

Sometimes social media ‘gurus and ninjas’ get a bit ahead of themselves, says Gregg Tilston Global Social Media Leader at FlightCentre. They’ll tell you that asking your community to ‘like’ a Facebook post as seemingly vacuous as ‘It’s Friday’ is ‘so old’, ‘so ridiculous’. “But I’m telling you,” he says, “for some of our brands a post like this can absolutely go through the roof.”

While Tilston isn’t suggesting they post this sort of thing everyday, he understands that if they want to gain the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm then they need to know exactly what a particular community is liking, commenting on and sharing. And if they really love the fact that it’s Friday, it is possible to know exactly how much with Facebook Insights. You can see all the positive stuff and also what people are hiding or marking as spam. “This really allows you to optimise your content strategy,” he says, although stresses that exactly how you do this will differ depending on where your community is in the world.

The word optimise is one Tilston, who has been with FlightCentre for four years, uses regularly and is what they are doing right now with social media. “Social may be about customer love and grooviness but we are really getting down to looking at community growth, referral traffic and then measuring conversions,” he says. “At end of day we are all measured on our hard activities that drive the bottom line.”

To know what activities are delivering you need to optimise on the data you have coming in from whatever tools you are using…Facebook Insights, Google Analytics from everywhere, he says.This will be a priority for FlightCentre this year. “We are making sure the tools are in place for all our teams to execute on local strategy,” he says. “So for example we are ensuing that we have a robust set of Hootsuite licenses to support the team and ensuring that the our own in house content management system, which deploys to social, to mobile to iPads and so on, can be used to maximum benefit by everybody.”  

Going big with gaming

The next big thing for FlightCentre is ‘gamification’. “We are really looking at how we enable people on whatever channel to partake, have an experience, get some sort of result from that experience and then challenge their friends with their result,” Tilston explains. FlightCentre today is seeing high levels of engagement from what could really described as ‘retro’ type games.  The simple flip card memory game has worked really well, another the ‘guess-the-blurry image to be able to enter a contest.  “It is about being fun, quick, engaging, getting them in, giving them a score and asking them to share using any platform,” he explains.

Then of course you looked at if it worked from your usual KPIs. How much traffic did it generate? What was the email sign up?

Social moves

FlightCentre is on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube mainly but also Google+ and a number of teams are testing Pinterest and Instagram is big for posting photos on blogs. But ultimately 90% of referral traffic still comes from Facebook. Is Google+ showing signs of promise.“Well put it this way, Facebook is our largest driver of measureable activity. Does being on Google affect our SEO ranking? Probably,” says Tilston.  So they recognise that they need to be on Google + too even if it isn’t driving as much engagement as initially anticipated.

Blogs too continue to be a large part of FlightCentre’s strategy although this varies by region.  Globally the group hosts around 25 blogs, but is looking at ways to grow relationships with bloggers in regions, like Asia, where there is less blogging penetration.

One thing is clear, Tilston has 100% buy-in from management. FlightCentre bought into the importance of social over 2.5 years ago and the commitment has been strong throughout. The UK started out with one social person, now there are six. In Australia it is similar story. The firm is committed to putting time and marketing resources against social because, says Tilson, they can see a return on it.

Doing it differently  

The firm is certainly not afraid to do things differently.  Building their own content management system, rather than using a firm like WildFire to do it for them is just one example although Tilston admits that Facebook, Google, WildFire “all think we are nuts.” But he says they had so many brands in so many countries with so many unique requirements that very few vendors could match what FlightCentre could do in house. “And if they could it was astronomically expensive,” he says.  

Of course, going alone comes with many challenges. For one, FlightCentre is not a preferred Facebook development partner which means it isn’t notified when any changes are made to the social platform. “If we were working with somebody like WildFire we would know and they would fix it, instead we have to do a bit of scrambling ourselves to find out what is going on.”

Money counts

For Tilston, keeping close eye on Facebook is essential. Will Graph Search, for example, take off? “Who knows,” he says, “but if it does I want to gain that as a marketer as much as a can.” So he and the team is thinking carefully about how they get people to engage, tag and create content around the experience FlightCentre and its brands give them – and hopefully right down to their location.

If Graph Search achieves mass adoption Tilston is confident it could have a significant impact on locations. “I think those that have leveraged content and been mentioned in links and engagement around the Facebook locations will benefit greatly from mobile graph search,” he says.

But when all is said and done what really matters on Facebook is spend - whether that is in the form of promoted posts, or ads, or remarketing.  “Where we are spending money on Facebook ads we are getting significant results. When you put money against I the organic reach multiplied by your paid reach multiplied by your viral reach is so much significantly more,” he says. One of the biggest challenges is getting the necessary support from Facebook in areas where they are not spending. “In Australia, they are fantastic, we get huge support but where we are not spending much on ads the support isn’t really there,” he says.

However, he is quick to point out that once again it depends on great content and this depends on your community. “Every brand and every business should be looking at what is working on Facebook and this is easily accessible on Insider Insights,” he says.

So what are Tilston’s top tips

1.      Optimise to maximise on the Facebook EdgeRank Algorithm

2.      Don’t tell me you can’t KPI social

3.      Report on that – so that your showing the marketing people with budgets

4.      Put spend against Facebook

5.      Figure out what channels are working for you.

6.      Pick and Choose if you are a small team.

7.      Optimise, optimise, optimise on the data you have coming in from insights from Google Analytics, from everywhere.

Whatever tools you are using leverage to optimise. 

Gregg Tilston Global Social Media Leader at FlightCentre will be speaking in Miami at EyeforTravel.com's Online Marketing Strategies for Travel 2013:
The America's & Caribbean (June 4-5)
.

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