UK travel website lowcostholidays.com has launched the first app to use Facebook’s ‘Were Here’ API function, to accurately measure most visited and ‘talked about’ destinations on Facebook.
The new ‘Top 10 Destinations’ app, built by Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Betapond, features a leaderboard of the most popular travel destinations in the world using the ‘Were Here’ API to access Facebook’s huge bank of location-based data on check ins, tagged people, photos and albums.
As well as providing a top 10 of the most popular ‘all time destinations’, the app is categorised into types of holiday destinations such as ‘clubbing holidays’ and ‘couples holidays’. This helps users looking for a specific kind of break to see where the most popular places are according to Facebook’s data. It will also show them whether their friends have visited specific destinations and allows them to post to their timeline directly from the app.
The ‘Top 10 Destinations’ app is a first for a travel brand on Facebook, showing Betapond’s continued commitment to innovation in tourism marketing on the platform. By using the ‘Were Here’ data it enables lowcostholidays.com to connect with it’s Facebook audience, providing them unique stories to share with users.
Unlike previous check-in based leaderboard Facebook apps it draws from a much larger source of data by using the ‘Were Here’ API.
Whereas a destination or attraction such as the O2 Arena on the Love UK Top 50 leaderboard has around 170,000 Facebook check-ins, using ‘Were Here’ to include data on additional people, photos and album tags shows a figure closer to 400,000. This means Facebook users are far more likely to see friends who have visited.
Having accessed the app, users can connect to a landing page at www.lowcostholidays.com and book their holiday. This activity is shared on the user’s timeline, notifying their friends and connected Facebook groups, encouraging other users to book via the destination page and use the app.
“We are excited to be the first company to launch this innovative app using Facebook functionality to further connect with our growing Facebook followers and believe that it will become a valuable tool to drive new holiday bookings” commented Lawrence Hunt, COO of lowcostholidays.com.
Justin Reid, Director of Destination Marketing, Betapond commented, “As Facebook strategy for tourism marketing matures, the data that can be extracted from the platform via tools such as ‘Were Here’ is going to be increasingly important. This new app is a powerful tool for lowcostholidays.com to connect with its Facebook audience, but it is also an indicator of the huge potential value in this data for destinations. Combine the number of mobile check ins, people tags and photo location tags with your existing Facebook audience and you start to see how it is possible to extract an actual ROI from your Facebook marketing strategy.”
www.lowcostholidays.com
http://betapond.com