Since the release of Facebook’s ‘Open Graph’, Facebook’s sticky little tentacles have been latching on to websites across the entire web. To some, the new universal ‘Like’ button was a trivial addition, adding little benefit over the already fairly widely used ‘Fan Box’ (which later became the ‘Like Box’). There are, however, distinct advantages to having this new little button.

Facebook have recently confirmed that if you include the ‘Like’ button on your site, your site (and also a link back to your site) will be findable in Facebook search without the need to add a separate Facebook page.

The main links you’ll find for Hotels in Facebook Search at the moment are links to TripAdvisor or Yelp (which have both greeted this new function with open arms). So, to fight for direct bookings through your hotel’s own website, adding the Facebook ‘Like’ button should definitely be up there on your ‘to do’ list.

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Google’s release of Buzz (social networking additions to it’s Gmail service) back in February will be seen by most people as a bit of a failure. It was the company’s first attempt at taking a piece of the social networking pie which is currently largely dominated by Facebook. There are now, however, rumours that Google aren’t done just yet. It is widely believed that Google are working on a more directly competitive social networking platform that will be closely modelled on Facebook’s hugely successful system.

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Search marketing specialist Vizergy, in partnership with HSMAI, devised and conducted an online survey to identify and understand how hotel marketing professionals are using the Internet to market their hotels and increase their ROI.

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Akamai Technologies have released the findings of a report that studied consumer responses to travel website preformance. The general feedback from the research was that if your site is not fast enough, you will lose out on bookings BIG TIME.

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Would you turn to Facebook when planning a business trip? If you’re British or American, your answer is probably “no”. If you’re from mainland China, you might answer differently…

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