Facebook as a marketing tool

In 2009 we redesigned Abbey Travel’s website www.abbeytravel.ie, resulting in greatly increased natural search ranking and an improved user experience.

As part of the project, Abbey Travel needed to ensure that they were also maximising all online opportunities, including relevant social networking sites.

In late 2009 we worked with Abbey Travel to develop a meaningful presence on Facebook, allowing them showcase their various products - from Sports Travel to Australia and Disneyland Paris. Fun and interesting photos and facts are regularly uploaded to the page in addition to specific offer information. Fans of the page then receive these updates through their news feed, thus giving Abbey Travel the opportunity to promote directly to a group of consumers who are predisposed to their brand.

We recommended to Abbey Travel, as we do to all clients, that they avoid an overload of offers and promotions on Facebook, since fans can be lost if a company’s newsfeeds are perceived as being too frequent or overly commercial. Also, in order to optimise their Facebook presence, all companies need to have a system in place to respond to consumer requests or queries very quickly. As an example of the importance of this, on one occasion Abbey Travel managed to turn a potential negative into a resounding positive, by the speed and forthright manner in which they responded to a misunderstanding about a price that had been posted.

As an initial step to recruit fans to the page we developed a campaign on Facebook that involved targeting housekeepers with kids, an audience that we specifically target for their Disneyland Paris offering. We created small colour advertisements that appeared on the Facebook listings of our target audience.