THE 2011

FACEBOOK
ENGAGEMENT
REPORT
A Snapshot Of The Asia Travel
Industry’s Market Leaders
Table of Contents
Execu&ve  Summary                    2

Preliminary  Ma4ers                    3

The  Rise  of  the  Big  Brands                  4

A  Year  of  Spectacular  Growth                  5

Number  of  Fans                      6

Fan  Page  Content  Strategy                  7

How  Many  Fan  Pages?                    7

Facebook  Applica&ons  Usage  Pa4erns                8
         Default  Facebook  Tab  Usage                  8
         Custom  Tab  Usage  Pa4erns                  9
         Leveraging  Social  Media               10
         Use  of  Interac&ve  Promo&ons               11

The  Top  20                     12

About  the  Publisher                   13

About  the  Author                   13

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Overview
This report assesses 20 Asian Travel Brands on a variety of metrics related to activity and engagement on the
social networking site, Facebook. The analysis looks at the number of Fan Pages maintained by each brand,
the fan counts for those Pages, the tabs used on the Pages and the content approach employed, with the goal
of synthesizing trends and patterns that define the market leaders’ use of this influential social media channel.

Principal Conclusions
The most significant conclusions:

• The last 12 months have provided huge growth in Facebook usage and Fan Base for the large
brands.

• Use of custom tabs is still at relatively low levels.

• Brands are largely failing to leverage their social media efforts.

• Very few brands are taking advantage of the full interactive potential of the Facebook platform.

facebook users in Asia

Indonesia 38,475,320
Philippines 21,523,360
Malaysia 10,508,200
Taiwan 9,168,620
Australia 9,721,920
Thailand 8,510,740
Hong Kong 3,658,020
South Korea 3,733,280
Japan 3,170,620
Singapore 2,483,640
New Zealand 1,894,720
Vietnam 1,351,840

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 2

PRELIMINARY MATTERS
The 20 Most Active Brands The Market Leaders
(listed in alphabetical order)
This is the second year we have undertaken an assessment of social

• AirAsia media engagement by Asian Travel Brands. The selection process for
this year’s report began by looking at 35 Asian travel brands active
• Air New Zealand on Facebook. Based upon the data collected, the list was narrowed
to a final set of 20 that we believe accurately represents the Top 20
• Anantara most active Asian travel brands on Facebook. The list of the final

• Asiana companies selected can be seen at left. 1

• Cathay Pacific
• Dusit Thani Who’s Included?
• HPL Hotels In terms of selection criteria, all the brands are based in Asia, though
many have properties elsewhere in the world. The selection critera is
• Jetstar broad enough to cover groups that control or manage multiple
• Karma Resorts brands, for example, HPL Hotels, an umbrella group that includes
various branded properties.
• Korean Air
Our definition of “Asia” includes Australia, New Zealand, Korea and
• Malaysia Airlines Japan, but does not include India. The focus is on English language
pages.2
• Mandarin Oriental
• Pan Pacific Hotels
& Resorts Representativeness
• Qantas Despite our best efforts, the data set suffers from several limitations:

• Shangri-La • China - As Facebook is blocked in China, this report provides no

meaningful insights into what is happening in that market. While
• Six Senses some properties inside the PRC are represented (e.g., Mandarin

• Thai Airlines Oriental Sanya), many are not.

• Tiger Airways • Japan - As Facebook is not the dominant social network in Japan,
Japanese firms may be under-represented. Additionally, local brands
• Tune Hotels who engage primarily in Japanese, not English, were not included.

• Wotif • Korea - Korean firms are also likely to be under-represented for the
same reasons we state regarding Japan, above.

1 A complete list of all the brands in this report, with URLs to their primary Facebook Fan Page, can be found at the end of
this paper.

2 Where a brand maintains multiple Fan Pages in multiple languages we have included in the count the non-English Pages.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 3

The Rise of the Big Brands
Where last year’s survey of the market leaders included a number of smaller, single property firms, this year’s
Top 20 is dominated by the big brands. As we observed last year, it was still early days. This year the
competitive landscape has shifted; the big brands have woken up and mobilized their significant resources and
it shows in our results.

Among the properties listed last year that were not included this year:

• Alila • Bangkok Airways

• Aman Resorts • Contiki Holidays

• Angkor Palace • Maldives Dive Travel

• Ayana Resort & Spa • Singapore Airlines

• Bali Individual Tour & Travel • Zuji

• Bali Safari & Marine Park

Of that group, many are smaller firms, or companies with only one property. The smaller firms, though more
agile in developing their Facebook presence, were not able to keep pace with the larger brands in the long run.3

New to the leader board this year are:

• Asiana

• Korean Air Travel Agents

• Pan Pacific Hotels & Resorts 5%
• Tune Hotels

The shift in the leaders has narrowed the

range of business categories represented in Accommodations
the Top 20. Where last year the selection 45%
set was both more diverse and more
Airlines
balanced, as the chart at right shows the
major players in 2011 come from two
50%
sectors: Accommodations and Airlines.
The sole company outside those sectors
was travel agent Wotif, who also appeared
in last year’s report.

3 It’s worth noting that two previous participants were excluded for reasons not related to their engagement levels: Zuji is
owned by US-based Travelocity and therefore not eligible for inclusion, and Bangkok Airways ceased operations since the
last report. Additionally, note that last year’s report identified 25 market leaders, where this year we have narrowed to
selection set to only 20.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 4

A Year of Spectacular Growth
2011 was a huge growth year for our market leaders. In every metric measured, we saw significant growth for
almost every brand we examined. If 2010 was the year the Asian travel industry woke up to social media, 2011
is the year the industry embraced it. Since we last looked in-depth at Facebook in 2010, Asian travel companies
have continued to expand their presence on the social network.

The chart at left provides a snapshot

2010 2011 of some of the key figures. The
number of Facebook Fan Pages
Average # (median)
8 11 maintained by the leading brands
Fan Pages per Brand increased for the second year in a
row. In 2011, the average number of
Most Common # (mode)
2 6 Fan Pages maintained by the market
Fan Pages per Brand leaders increased from 8 to 11, with 6
being the most common number of
Average # (median)
24,656 147,547 Fan Pages maintained.4
Fans per Brand
The most dramatic growth numbers,
however, relate to the number of fans
each of our brands enjoys. The average growth across the group was a remarkable 498%.

Key findings include:

• 50% of the group achieved more than 500% growth in their Facebook Fan base since our last report in
April of 2010.

• Four of our top 20 -- Cathay Pacific, Dusit Thani, Jetstar and Wotif -- managed growth in excess of
1,000%!

• In terms of fan count, the leader last year and this year remains the same: AirAsia. Last year, AirAsia
was the only company in the group with more than 100,000 fans. This year, AirAsia is the only
company to break the landmark 1,000,000 fans barrier, exhibiting a growth rate of 682%.

• Malaysia Airlines came in second both this year and last, with 355,073
fans -- a growth rate of 537%.
50% of our
• While many of the leading firms turned in impressive growth figures, the brands saw their
laggard in the group was Six Senses, who’s fan base grew by on 72%
fan base grow
over last year.
more than

500%
• The second slowest growth rate came from Qantas, which still turned in
a very respectable 233% rate of growth.

4This number is largely influenced by the engagement strategy employed by the brand; those brands allowing individual
properties to maintain their own Fan Pages have considerably larger numbers than those brands that centralize their social
media efforts.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 5

 Number of Fans (“Likes”)

AirAsia 1,322,243
Malaysia Airlines 355,073
Cathay Pacific 204,920
HPL Hotels 185,629
Air New Zealand 166,703
Shangri-La 142,291
Tiger Airways 85,466
Jetstar 83,790
Mandarin Oriental 82,821
Wotif 56,511
Qantas 46,839
Thai Airlines 40,875
Karma Resorts 30,932
Asiana 30,835
Dusit Thani 29,630
Tune Hotels 28,159
Korean Air 21,806
Six Senses 17,860
Pan Pacific 9,948
Anantara 8,591

As you can see in the chart above, when it comes to fans, airline brands dominate the group. Four of our top
five brands are airlines. Going a bit further, six of the top eight are from the airline sector. Given the airlines’
exposure to large numbers of clients, the dominance of the airline brands is probably no surprise.

The leading accommodation brand, HPL Hotels, draws it’s strength almost exclusively from the popularity of it’s
flagship Hard Rock Hotels operations in the region. Both the Penang and the Bali branches of the Hard Rock
have Fan Pages with over 75,000 fans each. The second place accommodations firm, Shangri-La 5 , maintains
a large number of Fan Pages, but the real strength in fan numbers resides in the group’s primary Facebook Fan
Page, which boasts more than 100,000 fans.

At the bottom end of this metric, the laggards are Pan Pacific and Anantara. If we look at the numbers in
terms of the average fans per Fan Page (as opposed to looking at total fans, shown above), Pan Pacific
actually finishes behind Anantara; Anantara averages 1,227 fans per Page, where Pan Pacific comes in at
less than half that amount, averaging 552 fans per Fan Page.6

5 The Shangri-La numbers also include the Traders Hotel brand.

6 Taking this one step further, if we look at the statistics in terms of average number of fans per Fan Page, Six Senses also
finishes behind Anantara, with an average of 638 fans per Fan Page.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 6

Fan Page Content Strategy
The market leaders exhibit a great deal of variety in their approach to the management of Facebook Fan Pages.
As the chart below shows, the number of pages owned by each brand ranges from 28 at the high end (Six
Senses), all the way down to 1 (Tiger Airways).

As a general rule, the accommodations brands in our survey maintained significantly higher numbers of Fan
Pages. Of the six brands maintaining the fewest Fan Pages, five are from the airlines category. There are,
however exceptions: three of our airline brands, Air New Zealand, AirAsia and Cathay Pacfic, maintain more
than 10 Fan Pages each.

Our research shows that the large number of accommodation brand Pages are the result of the creation of
individual Pages for the various hotel/resort/spa/restaurant properties under the brand umbrella. For the airlines,
in contrast, multiple Pages typically result from the creation of different Pages aimed at different geographic
markets.

How Many Fan Pages?

Six Senses 28
Mandarin Oriental 25
Shangri-La 23
Pan Pacific 18
Dusit Thani 17
Air New Zealand 16
HPL Hotels 14
AirAsia 12
Cathay Pacific 12
Thai Airlines 9
Anantara 7
Korean Air 7
Tune Hotels 6
Karma Resorts 6
Qantas 6
Jetstar 5
Malaysia Airlines 5
Asiana 2
Wotif 2
Tiger Airways 1
6 12 18 24 30

The total number of Fan Pages maintained by our group was 221. That total also shows significant growth over
the numbers for 2010.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 7

Facebook Application Usage Patterns
We looked at all 221 Fan Pages maintained by the leading brands in an attempt to gain some insight into the
tab usage patterns. The analysis revealed less variety than we expected. Not only were most brands using only
the default tab options, but also relatively few employed advanced interactive content applications. Moreover,
almost no Fan Pages were exploiting fully the possibilities offered by the use of iFrames in Fan Pages.

The default Facebook Fan Page offers a stock set of tabs. The default set can include7:

• Info

• Photos

• Discussions

• Notes

• Events

• Video

• Reviews

• Links

Default Facebook Tab Usage

Photos 98%

Discussions 57%

Notes 50%

Events 47%

Video 33%

Links 20%

Polls/Questions 14%

Reviews 12%

10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

Of the default tab options, only the Info tab is required and cannot be deleted or hidden. We found the Photos
tab to be nearly ubiquitous, with 98% of the pages employing the tab in some fashion; thereafter, however, we
saw a great deal of diversity. The Discussions and Notes tabs were the only other tabs to be employed by at

7 The exact contents of the default set depends on when the Page was created, as Facebook has made changes to this
functionality over time.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 8

least 50% of the pages8 . The Events tab was also seen in nearly half of the cases (47%). The other default tabs
were significantly less common, with the Polls, Questions and Reviews tabs being the least popular, as seen in
the chart, above.

Custom Tab Usage Patterns

In addition to the default tabs offered to everyone by Facebook, Page owners also have the option to add
custom tabs to their Fan Pages. Custom pages come in many forms, from ready-to-use third party applications
you simply plug in, to fully customized tabs employing iFrames. Given the flexibility that custom tabs add to Fan
Pages, you might expect them to be widely employed. The numbers however, are surprising: Slightly less than
half (48%) of the pages from our Top 20 brands included custom tabs.

The custom tabs we saw were used for a variety of purposes. The most common Less than
usage was simply to display text or promotional graphics. Many sites employed
“Welcome” pages, that is, custom tabs built to greet visitors on arrival to the Page.
50%
While the Welcome page technique appeared frequently, surprisingly few of the of Pages
Fan Pages went further to employ the “reveal” feature, which is used to encourage surveyed employ
visitors to “like” the Page. custom tabs.

Two Pages that use the reveal

functionality well are the
AirAsia Australia Page and
the Jetstar New Zealand

8Sadly, though, the Discussions tab was empty as often as not! The tab is published by default, indicating to us that some
companies were unaware that the tab could be removed or hidden if unused.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 9

 iFrames are an effective way to
add rich content into a Fan
Page without having to create
multiple pages inside of
Facebook itself. Additionally,
with iFrames, the source HTML
is kept on your server -- not on
Facebook -- and this means
you have not only full control of
your own code, but also more
flexibility in your design.

Even rarer were custom pages that

employed the iFrames option effectively;
most tabs still appear to have been
executed using the older FBML approach to custom tab/page creation. One company making effective use of
iFrames was Air New Zealand. The Air New Zealand “Fanatical” tab, shown above, uses iFrames to display a
page with multiple tabs that are linked to multiple pages of content. While the move from FBML to iFrames just
occurred in March of 2011, we would expect to see more of our market leaders employing this technique.

Leveraging Social Media

One of the issues we were interested in investigating was how well the leading brands were doing in terms of
the integration of their social media efforts. We looked at the Fan Pages of the Top 20 brands and captured the
number of Pages that included content on other social media channels, including Flickr, FourSquare, Twitter,
YouTube and RSS. The chart below shows the percentage of Fan Pages that integrate the content from these
other channels.

Twitter 6%

YouTube 5%

RSS 2%

Flickr 1%

FourSquare 1%

1% 2% 3% 4% 5% 6%

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 10

The numbers are surprisingly low. Perhaps the most obvious example is Twitter. All of the Top 20 brands
maintain at least one9 Twitter profile, yet only 6% of the Fan Pages integrate the brand’s Twitter stream. The
numbers are even worse for other social media channels, from 5% for YouTube to a mere 1% for Flickr and
FourSquare. Only one of our survey set incorporated a document sharing site (Scribd).

Despite their sophistication in other areas of Facebook usage, brands still seem to be treating their social media
channels as silos, as opposed to promoting engagement across channels. In this area at the very least, it seems
many companies are missing clear opportunities for richer engagement with their fans.

Use of Interactive Promotions

Another area with surprisingly low numbers is the use of interactive promotions. As the chart below shows,
relatively few of the Fan Pages employ tabs that contain interactive applications intended to directly promote
sales or build brand loyalty.

Contests 8%

Bookings 8%

Facebook Only Specials 4%

Games 1%

1% 2% 3% 4% 5% 6% 7% 8%
While there are a number of Fan Pages that employ content pages containing promotional information, the use
of Facebook purely for display advertising fails to take full advantage of the rich media and interactive
possibilities of the Facebook platform. The Facebook Only Specials category, indicated in the chart above,
typically took the form of content pages that employ the reveal functionality; a simple mechanism, but effective
for this limited purpose.

• Of those Pages employing Contests or Games, the most common application provider was Wildfire10 ,
though several Pages appear to be using proprietary gaming platforms.

• For those Fan Pages providing a Bookings and Reservations functionality, there does not yet appear to
be a dominant provider.

• Room bookings functionality came from a number of providers, including FastBooking.11

• Restaurant reservations were dominated by OpenTable.12

• Airfares and other more specialized bookings appear to rely on proprietary systems.13

9In most cases our Top 20 maintained multiple Twitter profiles. Five of our brands have more than 10 Twitter profiles. At the
extreme top end of the scale, Mandarin Oriental has 19.

10 http://www.wildfiregames.com

11 http://www.fastbooking.com

12 http://www.opentable.com

13 The source of a number of the bookings systems was not reliably discernible from the code on the Page.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 11

 The Top 20
Company/Brand Primary Fan Page

AirAsia http://www.facebook.com/AirAsia

Air New Zealand http://www.facebook.com/AirNewZealand

Anantara http://www.facebook.com/anantara

Asiana http://www.facebook.com/asianaairlines.korea

Cathay Pacific http://www.facebook.com/cathaypacific

Dusit Thani http://www.facebook.com/dusitthani

HPL Hotels n/a*

Jetstar http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jetstar-Asia/31975232581

Karma Resorts http://www.facebook.com/karma.resorts.group

Korean Air http://www.facebook.com/KoreanAir

Malaysia Airlines http://www.facebook.com/malaysiaairlines

Mandarin Oriental http://www.facebook.com/MandarinOriental

Pan Pacific http://www.facebook.com/pages/Pan-Pacific-Hotels-Resorts/32429338718

Qantas http://www.facebook.com/Qantas

Shangri-La http://www.facebook.com/shangrilaintl

Six Senses http://www.facebook.com/SixSenses

Thai Airlines http://www.facebook.com/thaiairwaysinternational

Tiger Airways http://www.facebook.com/pages/Tiger-Airways/100899678727

Tune Hotels http://www.facebook.com/tunehotels

Wotif http://www.facebook.com/wotif

* HPL Hotels does not maintain a Fan Page for their parent company; rather, their Fan Pages relate to the
individual brands under their umbrella.

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 12

 About the Publisher
EyeforTravel is a media company specialising in
business intelligence for the travel, hospitality and tourism
industry. For 14 years, we have been conducting industry
research and producing major industry events around the
globe to unite the industry and share best-practices,
trends and future forecasts.

EyeforTravel also provides some of the most in-depth

research into global online travel markets and trends. Our
research site at http://events.eyefortravel.com/knowledgebox/ is the information hub for the global travel and
tourism industry and is an indispensable tool for anyone who is involved in online travel or travel distribution.

We have a highly detailed Social Media case-study report coming out this June which will focus on Global
trends and best-practices from the most innovative and successful social media brands in travel. For more info
please email gina@eyefortravel.com

Contact  Details  
EyeforTravel Ltd Web: www.eyefortravel.com
7-9 Fashion Street Twitter: www.twitter.com/eyefortravel
London
LinkedIn: Asia Travel Executives
E1 6PX
eMail: marco@eyefortravel.com
United Kingdom

About the Author

water&stone is a full service digital agency based in Bali, Indonesia. The firm provides
interactive design, online marketing strategy and research services for companies
around the world, including a number of travel and tourism companies in Asia Pacific.
With a background in open source technology and an extensive track record in helping
clients realize value from new media, water&stone is one of only a handful of
companies in Asia-Pac that is able to deliver cutting edge strategy and design with
world class quality.

This report references data and conclusions published in April 2010 in the Asia Travel
Engagement Report. That Report can be downloaded free of charge from the
water&stone website by visiting: http://www.waterandstone.com/book/white-papers

Contact  Details  
23a Jalan Raya Semer Web: www.waterandstone.com
Kerobokan, Kuta Facebook: www.facebook.com/waterandstone
Bali, Indonesia Twitter: www.twitter.com/waterandstone
80361 eMail: contactus@waterandstone.com
T 62 361 739 969

2011 Facebook Engagement Report | 13