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Hi fellow hosties - I am 18mths in and realising the value of inviting guests to share my listing on Facebook.
Are you having success with a way of inviting this?
Best I can think of is contacting them as soon as they leave (while they are in transit home etc and still hot in love with their stay):
"Thankyou for leaving Retro Granny BnB so tidy and easy for us to clean/reset.
Safe travels and be sure to have any friends/family mention your name if they book in. We’d love to make extra fuss and will leave them a little surprise to find.
In the next 24hrs Airbnb will prompt you to review. For now though…gosh we would appreciate you leaving even just a star review on our Facebook page to help us get the word out about what we have on offer.
Thanks again for being so lovely to host.
All the best.
Mel and Adam"
What do you think? What do you have built in as a process that works?
We do this for Google, not Facebook.
After a guest leaves us a 5 start review, we send them a short message with a link to our google page for a review or rating.
I think google is the better place for this, since people will search on google for you and find you on google, not facebook. Google is the starting point of most travel planning.
I would not have my Airbnb listing on Farcebook if they paid me to put it there! IMHO it is NOT a “business venue”, it is primarily a rumor, propaganda and BS site.
You want to build you Airbnb reviews - that is where most of your bookings will probably come from. Two reasons I would discourage asking for comments/reviews on Facebook:
People get “review weary” and if they comment on FB they many not bother to review on Air.
FB is making it more difficult to see business pages. No guarantee that even the people that have “Liked” or “Follow” your page will even see it unless you take out paid ads.
Haha…ta konacoconutz. 18 mths ago we found a house in a street we really wanted to live in. It was out of our pricerange but with a cute-as-heck grannyflat so we bought it…gussied up the old girl and got her a domain name, facebook page and instagram account. People love feeling like they are back at nanas and she pays the increase in our mortgage.
Thankyou Chris. I had wondered this too. They are very different platforms, aren’t they? I guess I could send both links and invite to choose one. What I like about a facebook review is that their friends might see it and it be alongside them also talking positively about it to them in person. Mmmmm…hard one
Ta Ken. Sounds like you have had bad experiences. Gosh, I’m sorry…and I will proceed with eyes wide open. So far it works for us to get into past and potential guest’s inboxes with prompts about updates/new inclusions here at Retro Granny BnB. Posts about the chickens, for some reason, pull at many a heartstring and get us exposure. Who knew!?
What would you say is your thing you happily put time into to raise your profile?
The prompt from Airbnb to review seems to come later than it used to. Is that true? Sometimes over 24hrs later.
I find if I get in to check thhe flat asap after them leaving I can thank thenm for leaving it so tidy (hence clueing that my review of them will be really favourable) and catch the non-driving partner who is more likely to jump online somewhere to leave something while still hot to trot after a great stay.
I see your point though about fatigue (I have wondered if I could invite to fb or google review something to cut and paste into airbnb review once prompted)
I’ve been on Farcebook for a decade, give or take. I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. It’s a nice place to have Private Interest Groups (I belong to several) but not a place to blog or be wide open to the unwashed Public.
What do I "put time into to raise profile??
I actually have never found it necessary to “raise my profile”. From our ‘beginner boost’ we’ve had 4.9 and 5.0 stars across the board. We’re a seasonal destination and get pretty much all the business we want when we want it, and have time to do our own traveling and activities.
I put my time and effort into continuing to provide a unique location, space, and amenities at a reasonable price, for our guests. I’m always researching, revising and updating my gourmet breakfast-for-two menu from which the guests pick their prepared brekkie; searching out good but inexpensive wine that our guests don’t know they’re getting until they arrive; keeping the 'Key West-ian" decor and accoutrements updated, etc. My lady partner and I are always exploring our own area to find unique things that our guests can choose to see and do – exploring nature, the arts, and more.
Our rave reviews tell our story for us, we don’t need to “raise our profile”.
I wouldn’t want my guests posting my listing on FB with no control of unauthorised photos, address etc being uploaded. Don’t need them advertising pics of their filthy room for me when I hand it to them spotless!
I just started on FB and am still learning but the first thing I did was lock down the ability to post anything. And when posting is allowed, there is a way to pre-approve before it hits the page.
I don’t know how to do this yet but there is a coffee shop I follow that somehow has their FB set to update their Google reviews. So when they get a 5* on Google, it shows up as “you got a review!” and posts it on FB.
Now if only I could learn how to get a public calendar for events running for guests …
I haven’t used Facebook for a long time and one of the reason I stopped using it (for business and promotion purposes) was that quite simply, it didn’t work. There’s lots of evidence around (Google it) that FB just doesn’t work as a promotion tool any more.
Reach these days is so very minimal. Paying for FB ads is also a waste. My other half who is incredibly experienced in social media and every type of promotion looks after the FB account for his department. We both check the stats regularly and paying for ads does not improve reach or engagement these days.
So non-paid posts are even less likely to be seen.
I had the perfect example of this last year. Boring story I know but I spent 2 months pretty much unconscious in hospital. Until that time I had promoted my sites on FB on a daily basis. Obviously this didn’t happen whilst I was hospitalised. When I returned to the land of the living and the computer, I found that the hit rate to the sites, had not dropped at all despite the fact that I hadn’t used FB to promote the sites for months. Affiliate sales had remained at the same pre-hospital level.
I prefer to use two - Twitter and Flipboard. I get loads of hits from both. The thing I really like about Twitter is that it’s embedable on websites - either your own or someone else’s.
A blog is a great idea because this means that the information you are posting - a link to your blog - is useful, something that every social media post should be. You can post something different every day.
If you’re writing about your local area, it’s likely that your posts will be picked up by your local visitors’ bureau (or similar) and therefore spread out to a wider audience - and of course, there’s a link to your listing.
Have your blog posts available to your guests too. For example, I wrote and article entitled ‘Breakfast on Las Olas’ (Las Olas being our local street) showing where people can go to enjoy a great start to the day. We always give our guests face-to-face recommendations but so many enjoy the articles too.
I’m being sneaky here - the site owners don’t like us to post links that take viewers away from the site. But this is the example I was talking about. Sshh
I have been using FB to post nearby restaurant schedules and have been picked up by a couple of them in return. I enjoy telling people about fun things going on in our area. When I move there for good, I would love to get a job in tourism, haha!
I’m still learning and this is helpful, thank you!
Get yourself a blog. Preferably one with your own URL. I.e. yourlistingname.com or whatever - that’s easy for people to remember. Write regular articles about your area. Without knowing where you are these ideas might be daft but … ‘great places to eat’, ‘places to enjoy a picnic’, ‘a few of our local museums’, ‘how to use our local transport’, ‘book now for the xxxx festival’, ‘a great place to stay for the xxxx conference’, ‘photo ops in xxxx’, ‘walking tour in xxxx’, ‘how to enjoy xxxx’, ‘where to rent a bike in xxxx’ … SO MANY ideas!
Publicise these on social media and make sure that they are available to your guests. It’s so much better than the Airbnb guestbook
