How to Use Facebook Groups to Optimize Your Travel Agency Business

Facebook has an audience of over 3 billion active users. It is according to Statista statistics. It is no longer just a social network but one of the most powerful marketing tools available today. Promoting a Facebook group increases your online presence and reaches a wider audience. Social networks have a wide range of tools for effective advertising of travel services. But, like any promotion, it has many nuances, which we will tell you about below.

Why to promote a travel agency on Facebook?

With the right strategy and approach, Facebook group promotion can be an effective yet economical way to achieve your marketing goals. In general, Facebook group promotion solves the following tasks:

• Attracting traffic to the website
• Increase brand awareness
• Improve interaction with the target audience
• Increase customer loyalty

By promoting your travel agency on Facebook, you can customize advertising to the target audience and thus work only with customers who are interested in your travel products or services. And at the expense of this increase your profits.

Bookatrekking - a case study of a trekking company that succeed on Facebook

Bookatrekking is connecting trek enthusiasts with their dream journeys. With a thriving Facebook community of 5,000 followers, Bookatrekking has established a significant online presence. Moreover, it successfully converted social media engagement into website traffic and leads.

Its strategic approach:

• Engaging content: Bookatrekking invested in high-quality, visually appealing content. It showcases the breathtaking landscapes of the treks like Tre Cime Hike. Stunning images, captivating videos, and immersive storytelling evoke a sense of adventure and wanderlust.
• Consistent posting: Regularity was key to Bookatrekking's success. They maintained a consistent posting schedule. This consistency helped in keeping the audience engaged and eager for more.
• Interactive engagement:  The company actively encouraged user engagement through polls, quizzes, and questions. This way, it created a sense of community among their followers. By fostering dialogue and responding promptly to comments and messages, Bookatrekking built a loyal and interactive audience.

Through engaging content, consistent posting, and a strategic approach to conversion, Bookatrekking has built a thriving online community and translated that engagement into tangible business results.

Can a travel agency use a personal account to promote on Facebook?

No. And it shouldn't for several reasons. First, according to Facebook's rules, personal accounts should not be used for commercial purposes. If you ignore this rule, your page will likely be deleted. Second, personal profiles don't have the same features and tools as business accounts. And thirdly, using a personal account can hinder building a strong brand identity. Therefore, successful Facebook promotion is only possible if you create a separate business account or Facebook group.

What are Facebook groups anyway?

Facebook groups work in a similar way to Reddit communities. They are spaces for users with common interests who want to discuss their favorite subjects and be part of a community.

In this sense, Facebook groups complement business pages, creating a space reserved for interaction only by users who have requested access. This generates a feeling of belonging and appreciation, which are important factors for your company's performance.

But why create Facebook groups?

Facebook groups have different purposes. While some are intended exclusively for sales, others don't allow this practice, focusing only on user interaction.

Participating in a group is very interesting. First, you can study people's profiles and collect information to validate and help with your travel agency`s strategies.

Your approach in the groups must be subtle, avoiding advertising left and right and running the risk of being branded as spam. The best way to act in groups is to participate as another community member, trying to stay active and make a difference to other people.

Whenever possible, interact using your travel agency profile. This is important so that other users see that you value the comments you receive and that you value community interactions.

But you don't have to limit yourself to participating in other people's groups. You can have a group related to your travel agency. Over time, your group will become an exclusive community where people exchange experiences and interact with you.

What is important to measure in your own Facebook group?

Facebook groups also have important metrics that should be monitored. Through them, you can check details such as:

• Growth: Number of participants and incoming requests. This data can be exported to spreadsheets.
• Involvement: Times when there are more interactions, days of the week with the best traffic, most relevant posts, and interactions, among others.
• Members: Tist of the most active users and access to demographic data (age, gender, and location).

To get the most out of your own travel Facebook group, you can use Groupboss. With us, you can collect information about each person entering your Facebook group and then nurture them into your leads.

Strategies for managing travel Facebook group

Some tactics allow you to manage Facebook groups more practically and efficiently.

Participation questions

You can define up to three Facebook group membership questions to be answered by users who request to join the group. This is a good way of having more control over who participates in the community and getting to know the profile of those who join.

Location

According to Hootsuite, Facebook has more than 10 million groups worldwide, and around 1.4 billion users are part of a community. This data shows that being on Facebook is just as important as being found by those who are interested in your travel agency.

Unless you have a national presence, it's important to highlight the group's location so that people in your region can find it more easily while searching for something related to your topic.

Description

As well as the location, it's important to be careful with the group's description. The more detailed and complete the information, the greater your chances of standing out and only attracting users who are genuinely interested in the subject.

Posts

Anyone who has a group needs to keep it moving, generating constant interest and engagement from the community. Fortunately, Facebook groups allow administrators and moderators to schedule.

This is an interesting strategy for creating and implementing a consistent and constant content plan. To do this, take advantage of the metrics on the days and times of greatest interest and insist on what has worked.

Members

It's important that your Facebook group doesn't become a mess and keeps discussions focused. That's why you should always keep an eye on what's being commented on and posted in the community. You shouldn't be afraid to remove members who are a nuisance, whether for bad behavior or spam. To help nip this in the bud, Facebook has a series of filters for incoming requests, which speed up the work of managing groups.

3 tips for travel agencies to use Facebook groups

Adhere to these 4 tips to optimize your travel agency business with Facebook groups.

Invite your followers and determine the scope of the group

When you create the group, you can determine how private it will be. You can classify it as a public or private Facebook group. Anyone can join public groups, and Facebook group posts are visible to non-members. In closed groups, posting information is restricted to members. Other users can only see the name and who administers it. They can only join the group by invitation or through a request, which will be approved by the administrator or by a member who is friends with that user on the social network.

To begin with, we recommend that you invite users who already like your company's page, as they already have some involvement with the brand. Whether to make a public or private group will depend on the scope of your brand and your business strategy, but remember that private groups reinforce the idea of niche and exclusivity that many audiences are looking for.

More relationships and less reach

Facebook groups are not the same as business pages. The dynamics and the audience's expectations of the content are also different. While pages seek to reach new users and reinforce existing ones through posts, the idea of a group is precisely to have a narrower reach but with greater intensity.

Instead of working on reach, it works on relationships. Therefore, understand that the brand's level of commitment has to be higher here to nurture this audience and achieve your objective.

Talk about your area, not your brand

This item is a consequence of the previous one, but it is not always seen in this way. When we talk about building relationships, we're talking about creating even more value for your audience with debates and relevant content. In other words, don't just talk about your brand!

Publish content related to your sector and encourage your audience to participate and talk to them. Occasionally publish your blog content, too. Win over your audience through authority and trust, not through advertising. The idea of the group is precisely to get away from ads, and making content that is too commercial can alienate your audience.

Conclusion

Harnessing the power of Facebook Groups can be a game-changer for optimizing your travel agency business. You can establish a strong online presence and build trust with potential customers by creating a sense of community, fostering engagement, and providing valuable content.