As you might have read in the travel media over the last few days, we’ve just finished creating a new app for lowcostholidays.com. It’s a pioneering step for how destinations can promote themselves on Facebook, because it dynamically updates itself using the most powerful number Facebook has for showing the popularity of destinations – “Were Here”.

Were Here gives brands access to unique location-based data about Facebook check-ins, tagged people, photos and albums. It allows businesses to get a clearer picture of how Facebook users are interacting with attractions or destinations.

The O2 has 170,000 checkins

O2 displays more than 400,000 "were here"

For example, an attraction such as London’s O2 Arena has around 170,000 Facebook check-ins on the Love UK Top 50 leaderboard. But, when you add in Were Here data, the actual figure is closer to 400,000.

By tapping into this data source, the lowcostholidays.com ‘Top 10 Destinations’ app features a leaderboard of Facebook users’ most popular travel destinations. As well as the top 10, users of the app can check out destinations by ‘type’, for example, ‘clubbing holidays’ or ‘couples holidays’. This helps users look up the most popular places according to Facebook user data and the app will also show whether a user’s friends have visited specific destinations.

We’re really excited here at Betapond about the potential of Were Here for travel brands. As Facebook marketing strategies get more sophisticated, the data that can be extracted through the API with tools such as Were Here will allow tourism marketers to increase engagement, develop app strategies that resonate with fans and, ultimately, achieve return on investment.

You can check out the lowcostholiday.com app here.