Does social media matter? Not yet

Social media has gotten a lot of attention at trade shows and in the trade press in the past year, but how important are the likes of Facebook and MySpace when it comes to influencing whether or not a traveler stays at your hotel?

The short answer: Not much. At least not now, anyway.

According to the most recent travelhorizons survey, which is co-authored by Ypartnership and the U.S. Travel Association , only one in 10 Facebook users seeks advice about either destinations or travel service suppliers, and just one in 20 has joined a community of users who share a common travel interest.

Some key stats from the survey:

11 percent ask advice about a destination
8 percent ask advice about a travel supplier
6 percent learn about travel deals
5 percent get updates on destinations and travel suppliers
5 percent have joined a community with like travel interests
These findings intrigued me. After attending conference panels and reading articles (even from HNN) that laud social media as an indispensable means to reach guests, why are so few consumers reciprocating these efforts?

To find the answer, I conducted an incredibly unscientific survey in which I asked a few out-of-industry peers, all of whom travel at least five times a year, whether they use social media for travel-related purposes and, if not, why.

The most common response dealt with access and credibility. Instead of using social media to read up on their next travel destination, they more commonly used Google searches or visited Web sites that they knew had the information they wanted. And if not searching online, they were just as likely to call a friend—we all remember that anachronistic telephone device, don’t we?—to research or ask for advice.

With better sources of information out there, social media quickly fell to the wayside.

Or as one friend put it, “I’d rather use Facebook to find girls we graduated with from college than to look for hotel deals.”

So am I saying that the social-media revelation is a dismissible myth? No. As the technology and its uses evolve, it could very well become that “indispensable means” we so often hear about.

Peter Yesawich, Ypartnership’s chairman and CEO, explained as much in a recent blog: “How quickly (these survey results) may change is a matter of considerable speculation given the remarkable rate of penetration these sites have achieved in such a short period of time. Yet, for now, consumers continue to seek and respond to information about travel services and suppliers from more established offline and online media sources.”

And now if you’ll excuse me, I must visit the South Carolina Department of Tourism’s Web site to plan my summer vacation …