Facebook is the world’s most popular social network platform, with over 2 billion active users. Recent trends indicate that people increasingly use social media to plan, book, and review their trips. This leads to one conclusion: vacation rental owners must be active on Facebook to attract more reservations.
Building relationships and marketing your vacation rental company are excellent uses of Facebook. Facebook is another direct channel, similar to your website, via which business owners can get direct bookings and avoid using online travel agencies and their exorbitant commissions.
We have produced a Facebook marketing guide for vacation homes that explains how to advertise a vacation home on Facebook and boost direct bookings to assist you with using Facebook or changing your marketing approach on this social media platform.
The top 10 reasons why your rental company requires a Facebook business page are listed below, in addition to the advantages of using social media in general.
Why Promote Your Vacation Rental on Facebook?
The blue social network created by Mark Zuckerberg is still a vital tool for marketing your vacation rental and boosting bookings, even with the rise of Instagram. When it comes to marketing their holiday rentals, Facebook is a crucial tool for hosts, especially if you make the most of its enormous active user base.
Facebook is an excellent platform for promoting your vacation rental to a wider audience and for establishing and maintaining customer relationships. Using Facebook to market your company has several benefits, some of which are listed below.
1. Obtain More Potential Clients’ Attention
You may post images and comprehensive details about your holiday rental on Facebook. As a result, this will free up your time and let you establish new contacts, improve existing ones, and raise awareness.
If they aren’t planning to travel, 52% of Facebook users claim that seeing their friends’ travel photos influences their plans.
A user’s news feed is automatically updated each time they interact with your content. So, every time someone “likes” your page or any of your postings, hundreds or even thousands of their friends may view it. As a result, it helps you advertise more and reaches a wider audience than you might have thought possible. Through the simple act of scrolling through their feed, users can find your page. Finding new potential clients is a possibility with every article.
2. Promote exclusive discounts and offers
Today, thanks to the many tools available, managing a Facebook page is simple. Facebook allows you to plan posts in case you forget or aren’t accessible to post at the appropriate time. In addition to maintaining your blog or a weekly email, make frequent posts to keep the audience interested. Remember to frequently modify the content, rotating between photographs, videos, articles, suggestions, and rankings. In a nutshell, everything you can think of that visitors would find interesting.
You can use your Facebook page to inform users of exclusive offers, events, and promotions. If you wanted to offer a special discount, for instance, “three nights for the price of two” or “30% if you book weekdays,” you could do it at off-peak times or around Black Friday. It is possible to publish cancellations, even at the last minute.
3. Maintain Contact with Prior Guests
Facebook can be utilized as a tool to improve your chances of being booked and stay in touch with previous guests in addition to uploading pictures and other pertinent information about your vacation rental property.
You can ask current visitors to share holiday photos and tag your rental when they are there. In the same way, prior renters can add pictures from their stays on your property. You may invite them to share your content so that more people will learn about your property. The best method to keep involved with visitors is to interact with them by posting likes, moods, and comments.
Another way to establish a reputation is through Facebook. Your website’s trustworthiness increases with the amount of interaction on it. You develop a reputation as a host while also making your company appear professional. Visitors can effectively promote your rental through page ratings and comments on posts and photographs. The finest brand ambassadors are satisfied consumers, and they will also provide you with valuable business insights. Observing all these testimonials and remarks, prospective visitors will feel more secure in both you as a host and your rental.
Your rental will be more visible, and your company will appear more credible the more active you are on Facebook.
4. Find your target market
Since Facebook has 2.41 billion active users each month, it’s highly likely that a sizable portion of your target market currently regularly uses the site. You can share your listing and reach a wider target audience by joining particular pages and posting there.
Use Facebook Insights to evaluate your fan base, find out their demographics, learn about their interests, and determine whether they prefer video postings over photographs, surveys, quizzes, etc. It will assist you in better comprehending your target market and the kind of material they are interested in.
You can create marketing campaigns using Facebook Ads by collecting data based on your followers’ demographics, interests, behaviors, or links. You can market your rental, whether it’s a beach hut, bed, breakfast, cabin, or guesthouse, to specific audiences. The amount you want to spend (either a cap for one advertisement or a campaign total) and what you want to spend it on are both up to you as the owner of a vacation property. Additionally, you may use Facebook’s Ad Manager to track the effectiveness of each advertisement there.
5. Evaluate Brand-New Services and Products
Consider a few developments that have happened since you first began working in the vacation rental industry:
- Your kitchen may have just undergone renovations.
- The décor has changed, right?
- Even so, do you have any new listings?
- Currently, do you offer any extras?
- Has new furniture been purchased?
- Do you have a pool in the backyard that you’ve renovated?
Share these developments with everyone! Make a Facebook post that includes some photos and a description. News regarding your vacation rental should be shared with your followers and prior visitors.
Spread the word if your rental, which was closed during the low season, is suddenly open during the winter.
6. Link to location-based applications and Facebook Places
People love to tell their pals where they are on social media. By turning on Facebook Places, users will be able to check in through your Facebook page. If they choose to like your page after seeing their update in their news feed, they will be prompted after checking in. If you have the correct router, you may even configure Facebook WiFi, allowing users to join your network without a password or an account.
Particularly when they are on vacation, Facebook users love to post the areas they are in. Each registration might represent a possible new consumer. Your rental will be visible to all of a user’s friends each time they add it as their location. These users will become familiar with your vacation home, look up details, and who knows—they might decide to reserve it when they visit your region.
In addition, additional check-in apps like Swarm or Yelp can help you increase website traffic. These applications share your check-in on their app and several other social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram.
If your guests use these location-based apps, you may even go above and beyond and provide special discounts or freebies! Only a few vacation rentals do this, but some businesses, like Best Buy, give customers who check into their stores online a 20% discount.
7. Work with neighborhood companies
Facebook is a really helpful tool for making connections with and interacting with local businesses that may help promote your vacation home among their contacts and establish a separate virtual community from the one you are already establishing. Make an effort to “like,” “mention,” or “tag” the Facebook sites of neighborhood businesses. If you mention them in your postings, you can even include hashtags and related tags with the “@” symbol.
Before your guests’ arrival, email them a list of the restaurants, attractions, and events you plan to attend. They might also pay you back by letting numerous businesses know what you have done.
8. Interact with visitors promptly and simply.
As an informal and quick mode of contact, visitors frequently use Facebook Messenger. Without waiting for a callback or sending an email, it enables visitors to ask inquiries immediately and directly. With the help of messenger, you may interact with potential visitors, leave a positive first impression, and secure additional reservations. You may accomplish significant goals if you set out just a little time each day to reply to communications.
You can set yourself apart from your rivals by using Facebook Messenger. Without giving up the benefit of a personalized conversation, you may give potential tenants real-time support and emulate the growing number of business owners who utilize virtual assistants to save time.
Your Facebook page may obtain the emblem for having high responsiveness to messages, which will be displayed to all visitors, depending on how quickly you respond and how many messages you receive. Given that consumer engagement helps improve sales, Messenger is especially significant when used in conjunction with a “book now” button on the page.
9. Construct contests, questionnaires, and tests
Sweepstakes, surveys, and quizzes are a few more ways to expand your company on Facebook. These tactics have already been shown to be effective for hotels and vacation houses. Your fans can win inexpensive gifts, such as t-shirts bearing your brand or even a free night’s stay, in the contests you host. Your rental property will attract interest as a result of all of this.
Competitions work well because they interact with the growing number of page fans and collect email addresses that may be used for future growth strategies.
Additionally, you can conduct a brief survey or inquire about your facilities, suggestions for property improvements, or customer feedback. You’ll not only come up with new ideas, but you’ll also be able to show your clients how much you respect their opinions and care about their needs.
10. Drive more visitors to your website for vacation rentals
Facebook is only another channel for attracting visitors to your website. You may improve the number of visits to your website and the likelihood that they will make reservations by publishing all of your content on your Facebook page, including images, posts, updates, and even special offers.
You can incorporate a share button on your vacation rental website so visitors can tell their Facebook friends about it. Facebook integration is simple for websites that list holiday rentals. With the help of Lodgable, you may increase traffic by linking your website to your social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Entering your Facebook profile is as simple as going to your website’s settings. You can integrate a “Book now” or “Inquiry” button on Facebook that directs potential customers to your website after connecting your website and Facebook page. In-depth training is available in our support center.
