Facebook Helps Baytown Tourism Grow

Not only does social media work for finding jobs, but it's also helpful for promoting business. State tourism bureaus are using Facebook and other social media to attract visitors. Baytown is one example of a city that's embracing social media to improve its tourism.

The city of Baytown is utilizing Facebook and other social media to give tourists a sense that there are other places to visit besides Houston and Galveston, Texas.


With at least 500 million active users on Facebook, at least half log on everyday and usually stumble across advertisements from everywhere. Some may have noticed popular attractions online for places like Baytown. Patti Jett, a public affairs coordinator with the city of Baytown, said social media sites like Facebook have been instrumental in attracting tourists from all over.

"Our target audience being teenagers, young families with children - the kind of people that would come to a water park; people that would use a water park - social media is one of their primary ways of getting information," Jett said.

"We just opened the water park in June of 2010, and already we have over 12,000 friends on Facebook. We posted the commercial on You Tube, and the You Tube commercials already had about 13,000 hits on it."

Since traditional advertising can be expensive, being able to use social media to promote tourist attractions is a huge advantage for Baytown.

"We might not be able to hit every trade magazine or every newspaper for traditional advertising, whereas with social media our message can get across the world for free, essentially," said Jett.

Not only is Baytown known for places like Pirates Bay, but also for its shopping, fine dining and fishing to name a few.

"We're not going to abandon traditional marketing. But this [social media] is something that we can use. It's another tool in our arsenal of things of getting the word out. So if you figure that we had 70,000 people in our first inaugural season at Pirates Bay, that really tells you something for how well our [social media] marketing is working for us."