Facebook is aligning with Microsofts Bing to help serve searches with a flavor of social media. What does that mean? It means that when you search for something on Bing, your search results will try to be relevant  by using content from your Facebook friends, particularly their likes.

Good Luck!. It will not work very well for Hotel and Tourism operators who try to get as many friends and fans and often have little in common with them. This is true of many businesses and professionals so the idea of friends is rather loose.

But By giving Bing access to 500 million user profiles, Facebook may give  Microsoft an advantage over  Google  in online search for travel in other ways. Facebook is becoming a power house in travel with its reviews and votes (like button) for hotels etc. With bookings (http:/arcresbookings.com) now being integrated into Facebook it makes more and more sense for Tourism to use this channel. Bing Yahoo Facebook is a powerful force, Google dominance in search  is under attack!

Add in the new Windows Phone7 - will Facebook finally have a strategic partner in the mobile Space?. A new social mobile platform maybe. Perhaps, consider this - 20% of facebook users login in via a mobile phone, that s100 million mobile phone users loggin in to facebook.

By any standard  Facebook is important to travel, to hotels and tourism and to business. Nearly every major brand has a Facebook page which they promote on TV and all media.

So use Facebook, put your booking engine on it or get a Facebook engine - we are happy to help you install arcResBookings.com for Facebook. Put Facebook Like button on your hotel and tourism website.Travelers use these and it makes a huge difference. I know of one company that had 1900 visit before the added the Like Button, now that it is added the visits have gone up to 47,000 over the same period a year earlier year.




 
The revamped group is not going to work for travel sites as the old one did. In the old version anyone could join the group and the discussion. THe new groups is a tight membership by invitation and referral system, not at all suitable for the drop by crown of travellers. For that Facebooks wants you to use Pages. see http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20018796-36.html?tag=mncol;txt  - Get your hotel and tourism business on your  Facebook page now with our free trial: http://trial.arcResBookings.com
 
 Marc Krisjanous of New Zealand Business Blogs has just released a Facebook for Business eBook which contains over 130 pages of hints/tips for using Facebook as a communication and branding tool for your business.
Story on http://www.tourismindustryblog.co.nz/2010/08/facebook-for-business-ultimate-guide-ebook-to-diy/comment-page-1/#comment-1450 - - arcResBookings application will load and manage your hotel on Facebook - http://trial.arcresbookings.com
 
Facebook announces upgrades to its photo-sharing product: Offering  high-resolution photos, "tag" people in bulk, "and browse photos in a more streamlined fashion that doesn't load individual pages each time a new photo is viewed".  Get your hotel bookings and content on Facebook with http://arcresBookings.com -
Read more on Facebook hi rez at : http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-20018211-2.html?tag=nl.e776#ixzz11CS6vxvI