Now You Can Tell Facebook Friends Where You’re ‘Traveling To’

Facebook has added “Traveling To” to its roster of feeling-and-doing status update options. Now people can share their travel plans with friends in a Facebook-official manner. The feature is accessed by the smiley-face icon on status updates from the desktop and mobile apps. Among the other choices:  Feeling, Watching, Reading, Listening To, Eating, Playing. Currently, […]

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Facebook has added “Traveling To” to its roster of feeling-and-doing status update options. Now people can share their travel plans with friends in a Facebook-official manner. The feature is accessed by the smiley-face icon on status updates from the desktop and mobile apps. Among the other choices:  Feeling, Watching, Reading, Listening To, Eating, Playing.

Currently, sharing a Traveling To status won’t change the information that Facebook serves users, but we can imagine future enhancements that will tailor your experience to the place you are visiting. It could connect you with friends who live in the area, make sightseeing, dining and hotel recommendations based on friends’ favorites or favorites among all Facebook users in a region.

It’s certain to be data of interest to travel and tourism marketers, but it remains to be seen how widely it’s used by people on Facebook. There’s a natural wariness about posting travel plans on social media accounts. And the fear that bad people will use the information to break into empty homes runs through many of the comments on Facebook’s photo post explaining the new feature.

Wise users, of course, will share travel plans only with friends on the network. So I guess the question is: do you trust your Facebook friends?

What do you think? Will Traveling To be widely used?

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Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Martin Beck
Contributor
Martin Beck was Third Door Media's Social Media Reporter from March 2014 through December 2015.

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