The tourism organisation, which is funded by councils in the region, launched the Facebook page Love the West late last year.

Most of the posts are generated by WMT's public relations agency and are about events happening in the region. As of last week, Love the West had 76 fans.

More "popular" is the Facebook page 'Every time I step into Footscray I fear for my life', which as of last week had attracted 2335 fans just a week since being launched.

WMT executive officer Damien Ryan said the Facebook page had been launched as an experiment because the website was a phenomenon that appealed to people from generations Y and X.

"They say to get an audience of 50million people on radio it takes 15 years and on television it takes 10 years, but on Facebook you can have an audience of 100million in nine months.

"We haven't done a lot of marketing of it so we've only got a small number of people subscribing to it so far."

Mr Ryan said there were plans to promote the page this year.

"We're constantly trying to find ways to publicise things without having to spend money on it." Resources will be directed to promoting the region to 'weekenders' from western regional Victoria and South Australia, including a major feature with a daily newspaper in Adelaide.

"They [weekenders] quite literally go by as they head into the city.

"If they're driving and they don't like driving in the city, we can offer them really high-quality accommodation and restaurants without the hassle."

Last year, the region's two biggest attractions - Scienceworks in Newport and Werribee Open Range Zoo - recorded their highest visitor figures

"For Scienceworks it was because of the Star Wars exhibition, which attracted 192,000 visitors. They had projected 110,000 so that's almost double. A lot of those visitors had never been to Scienceworks before so it's also new audiences," Mr Ryan said.