Most social marketers still consider Facebook their most valuable hotel social media platform and it shows by the amount of ad revenue poured into the platform: 2017 ad revenue for Facebook is nearly three times as much as Google.

According to eMarketer, Facebook grew by 12.8% to 1.34 billion users in 2016 and recently Mark Zukerberg announced that Facebook has hit 2 billion monthly users. But so far this year growth has actually waned to 9.6% and is predicted to slow to 7.9% growth through 2018.

As a consequence ad revenue is predicted to slow down. A contributing factor is that Facebook ads have nearly saturated user news feeds to the point where consumers don’t even look at the ads anymore. For hotel marketers, this means there will be some fierce competition for ad space and the cost to advertise will increase all while consumer engagement declines.

Despite these issues, hotel social media marketers are not stopping or slowing down any advertising in Facebook. In fact, 62% of marketers consider Facebook their most important marketing platform. The reasons seem to be because of the sheer size of Facebook’s user base and perhaps the hope that Facebook will make some changes to turn this situation around.

Facebook is acutely aware of the growing ineffectiveness of their news feed ads and the rapidly declining click-through rates it causes so they presented another option in Messenger ads for both Facebook and Instagram. Facebook states over 2 billion messages are sent between people and businesses every month and, if stats hold true, this could mean booking possibilities for hotels.

According to a recent Social Media Examiner report, marketers need to change it up a bit and use varied ad formats as a work-around to the news feed overload. SME shows 75% of the participants in their report said they would use video content and 61% would use live video. So adding video to your hotel content strategy might be just the thing to catch users’ attention.

Like anything new, there are bugs to work out. Facebook has had their share of questionable metrics but corrected the problems and have shown their resilience over the years by turning mistakes into lessons learned. None-the-less, hotel social media marketers should be mindful of metrics for any new Facebook ad initiatives to ensure that they are getting the most out of their advertising spend.

About Lodging Interactive

Headquartered in Parsippany, NJ, Lodging Interactive is a full-service digital marketing and social media engagement agency exclusively servicing the hospitality industry. Through its web design and search optimization division as well as its CoMMingle Social Media Division, Lodging Interactive provides effective Internet marketing services to hundreds of branded and independent properties as well as management companies, restaurants and spas. CoMMingle has established itself as the largest provider of reputation management services for the hospitality industry, handling over 200,000 guest review responses. The company also offers fully managed Live Chat agents for hotel websites through its LiveChatForHotels.com division.

Lodging Interactive is an HSMAI Adrian Award winner, and has won awards from the International Academy of Visual Arts, Interactive Media Awards, Horizon Interactive Awards, Web Marketing Association, Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts, and Travel Weekly’s Magellan Awards have recognized Lodging Interactive as an industry leader.

Lodging Interactive is a proud supporter of the Hotel Sales & Marketing Association International (HSMAI) and the company’s president, DJ Vallauri, currently serves on the Board of Directors of HSMAI’s New York Chapter and is a Forbes.com Agency Council contributor. For more information, please contact sales@lodginginteractive.com, 877-291-4411 or visit the company’s website: www.lodginginteractive.com