Sally Fielding gave us an insight into why she chose Facebook as the main platform to build her huge online following for Sally’s Cottages.

The Cumbria-wide firm has 350 cottages on its books compared to major competitors like cottages.com, but Sally’s has ten times more interactions and twice as many Facebook fans.

We spoke to the firm’s founder and MD, Sally Fielding, to find out why she has put so much effort into Facebook.

“We chose Facebook as our platform of choice and we use it every day to try and encourage people to dream of the Lake District.

“So we always use high quality pictures of the area and we have pics of the cottages on Facebook every day which get a fantastic response.

“We answer every single comment that’s posted on our page and we’ve formed relationships with people that we would never have done without the power of social media.

“Last year we registered £160,000 worth of bookings directly through the Facebook page and those are only the ones that we can measure, there will be more that we cannot.

“We’re just finishing up a giveaway competition today and by the time it closed we dealt with 10,000 comments and it’s really fantastic.

“I like to look outside of the county at our competitors, so Cottages.com have 18,000 cottages nationwide where we have 350 but we’ve got twice as many followers and 10 times the interations.

“Social media allows us to compete on that sort of level. “