VisitBritain Claims 44% of its Facebook Page Visitors Become Tourists

Almost half of all travelers that scroll through VisitBritain’s Facebook page Love GREAT Britain financially commit to a trip, VisitBritain is claiming this morning in what may be the greatest conversion stat of all time, if true.

The national tourism board is sharing 10 of its Facebook milestones in celebration of the social network’s 10-year anniversary, but there isn’t necessarily a verifiable connection between the landmarks and the conclusions. The organization’s CEO began sharing the milestones on Monday morning on Twitter, but the tweets were later deleted.

The surprising conversion of Facebook visitors to actual visitors is based on a survey of people who remember visiting the page between April and August 2013 and have since claimed to have visited or financially committed to a trip to Britain by the end of 2014.

Besides being a fantastical conversion rate envied by marketers and religious prophets alike, this statistic is almost impossible to accurately capture without a trail leading to bookings.

Methodology

In the survey of 2,349 people, 88 percent of respondents said they definitely remembered or think they remembered visiting the Love UK Facebook page between April and August 2013.

A quarter, or 26 percent, of that group had already financially committed a trip to Britain. But 50 percent were considering or currently planning a trip. This suggests half of the respondents that remembered visiting the page had the potential to be influenced by it.

The survey was conducted in September, one to five months after the respondents’ page visits, and asked the 50 percent of respondents who had been planning a trip at time whether they had visited or financially committed to a trip to Britain since their contact with the Facebook page. Forty-four percent said yes.

Other Findings

The tourism board also reports that Facebook users stay twice as long in Britain (18.5 nights) as the average visitor (7.4 nights) and that 41 people of people that visit the Facebook page go from from a ‘possible’ visit to a ‘certain’ one.

VisitBritain’s Facebook metrics on SkiftIQ. Click for full details.

VisitBritain launched its Facebook page in December 2009 and is on track to reach two million “Likes” by the end of the this year.

No matter how sound VisitBritain’s milestones really are, its performance on social media is better than many of its peers. Of the 380 destinations tracked on SkiftIQ, VisitBritain has the sixth most popular Facebook page with more than 1.9 million “Likes.” VisitBritain updates Facebook twice a day and 93 percent of its posts are photos.

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