By Douglas Quinby

On August 24, we conducted a webinar presenting results from our latest research on social media in travel. We frequently poll our online audiences, and we asked one question that got some pretty exciting results.

I wanted to find out if attendees, who primarily comprised marketing and distribution professionals in the travel industry, viewed Facebook as a valuable source of converting traffic – that is, traffic that resulted in a sale or booking. But we included a more nuanced set of response options to gauge the extent to which our audience was leveraging the behavioral targeting capabilities of Facebook’s ad platform. These tools enable advertisers to target ads not only to specific demographic profiles, but also to audiences with specific likes and interests, as expressed through their behavior on the social network. The results below speak for themselves.

Question: Is Facebook a valuable source of converting traffic?

Source: Informal audience poll of PhoCusWright Webinar, August 2011.

Now, as a travel research firm, PhoCusWright takes research pretty seriously. So I am going to be the first to say this is hardly a scientific, projectable poll. We had an audience of over 100 professionals spanning the travel industry, who are clearly interested in social media. So do not think for a moment that this reflects the broader travel industry. But it is still striking that three in four attendees said yes, Facebook is a valuable source of converting traffic, and behavioral targeting is key.

As we found in our analysis of referral travel from Facebook to hotel websites, conducted in partnership with Compete for this report, the conversion rate on immediate, same-session referrals from Facebook is consistently higher than the conversion rate on comparable referrals from traveler review websites, such as TripAdvisor, TravelPost and others. So clearly something is afoot with Facebook. We have several compelling indicators that Facebook could play an increasingly influential role in the travel planning process.

Nonplussed by Google+

An interesting tidbit from another polling question: we asked attendees what they thought of Google’s latest social offering, Google+. Few think it’s a game-changer; most have no opinion or think it’s too early to tell. Here are the results:

Question: Google claims to have millions of users for its new social network. What is your assessment of Google +?

Source: Informal audience poll from PhoCusWright Webinar, August 2011.

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