Another benefit is the internet, the social media aspect makes you almost portray, reconstruct and relive their trips. Pudliner 2007. This excessive interview with pudliner makes the essence of social media much more clear as why it’s such a good tool to use. Although ones opinion may differ from someone else’s it is still a great way to advertise as there are more than one reviews available. I have spoken mainly about get a ways a and hospitality, but social media also has an intense impact on tourism as, The tourism industry is an information intense industry says: (Sheldon 1997 and Werthner and Klein 1999) It is crucial to understand in technologies and consumer behaviour that impact the distribution and accessibility of travel related information.
Benefits of social media application The prevalence of social media and its various function is beneficial to the hospitality and tourism management. Promotion For the hotel, utilizing the social media to identify the pros and cons as well as convey informative content to customers leads to effective and efficient promotion. Promotion is associated with all kinds of activities that communicate and advance the product and service. Because of the widespread use of internet and social media, the hotel operator attaches great importance to hotel promotion on social media channels instead of the costly traditional advertisement. It’s easy to discover that a group of tourists enjoy writing their traveling or hotel experience in social media site
Blogs, message boards and chat rooms provide an experience that could be described as social media, but the term is more strongly identified with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on. Social media offers a wide range of opportunities for hotel businesses of varying sizes and has the potential to market products and services to hundreds of millions of people. For example, instead of expensive, perfectly shot photos in brochures or advertisements, candid photos uploaded by customers can create a first and lasting impression of a hotel. It has been suggested that hotels should effectively use social media channels to better appeal to consumers and to recognize a significant return on investment. Given the rampant use of social media, it’s clear that tremendous benefits can accrue for companies that enable effective social media interventions, including conveying information about their service, maintaining brand perception, encouraging highly satisfied customers to speak well of their experience, and offering immediate response to negative
Moreover, as online purchasing trend is increasing, adoption of effective online marketing strategy is important for businesses as it is the means of reaching millions of customers all over the world. It is noticed that online marketing strategy influences the customer buying behaviour either positively or negatively (Dennis, et al., 2009). This is because customers grab the image of the brand as it is shown to them on the online media. There are some of the characteristics of online customers, which include direct information seekers, bargain hunters, undirected information seekers, directed buyers, and entertainment seekers. It is important for the organisations to consider these characteristics within their marketing strategy so that larger amounts of customers are attracted.
Social network sites during the last decade are considered to be one of the greatest technological developments worldwide. Harsh Agrawal 2014 defines social media as an “interactive dialogue between organizations, communities and even an individual”. The use of Internet gives you a great advantage as an individual as you can easily communicate with your friends, and at the same time it makes it possible for organizations to promote their business in different parts of the world using different online platforms . Consequently, from an individual’s point of view, social media can be described as a powerful and dynamic way to connect people by allowing them to share and exchange personal information. At the same time business perceive social media as a powerful marketing tool that can be used to contact consumers.
In our current hyper connected world, the increase in interactivity in the digital space has led to rise of social media. Social media is widely used by travelers for cultural tourism and travel products (Buhalis and Law 2008; Hennig-Thurau et al., 2010 as cited in Öz, 2015). Social media networking allows tourists
Categorically, social media can be explain as an application whereby people advertise and communicate with themselves on a personal level using various methods such as Facebook, Flicker, Hi5, MySpace and Twitter. However, social media is not only patronized for social interaction only, most media firms nowadays capitalize on the rapid growth and fast way to get hold of their audience by posting event listing, press releases, breaking news information and so on. In general terms, social media enable users to share information and collaborate with each other to create web content and utilize it. It refers to users’ activities, practices, and behaviors occurring through media via sharing information, knowledge, and opinions. These technologies are internet-based and they facilitate creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users indeed, social media puts great emphasis on sharing, participating, and collaborating processes and activities.
Chung et.al (2013) stated that “unlike existing media types, social media can be viewed as the highly persuasive media that changes traveller’s behaviour”. Social media can be known as online platform platforms for the interaction, collaboration, and creating/sharing of various types of digital contents (Slyvis et.al, 2013). Popular social media like Facebook, Instagram and YouTube will influence tourists because experienced tourists usually used the social media to write on their experiences, upload photographs or they do video bloggings or vlogs on the tourism products, services and destination to share their reviews with the other people. The experiences, photographs or vlogs posted the social media about the tourism products, services and destination are capable to persuade other tourists because the experiences shared are convincing or authentic and the photographs or vlogs taken are attractive and enjoyable. All of these will create the sense of eagerness for the tourists to travel and visit the same destination or purchase the tourism products and services like the experienced tourists did.
For businesses it represents a marketing opportunity to transcend middleman and it also enable the companies to connect directly with their customers (Pegoraro et al 2010). This is the reason that nearly every company is using and exploring social media as a part of its marketing activities. Social media is among the best opportunities available to companies for connecting with prospective consumers. Social media is the medium to socialize with customers and this media has more intensity to win the trust of consumers by connecting with them at deeper level (Drury 2008). The most important reason for the use of social media is that a company wants to build awareness of its brand among the potential customers.
Within the literature review many business in the world has successful implement social media on their business, so that they can target the whole world population. Social media and Small Medium Enterprise (SMEs) In 2009, Chua et AL said that “SMEs are not homogeneous group but they are different classified in many ways. For example, entrepreneurs are from different age, different academic background and different attitude towards social media”. Social media refers” to a wide range of online, word-of-mouth mediums, enterprise sponsored talk boards, Internet talk boards and forums and social networking sites” ( Mangold W.G. & Faulds D.J., 2009).