Social Media Influence Tourists Behavior

1.0 Introduction

In this twenty-first century, the information and communication technologies (ICTs) have increasingly become an important role in the society. Today, information is carried at phenomenal speeds within and across various communication networks known as ICTs where these allow the transfer of massive amounts of information in a matter of seconds, enabling humankind to advance in a multitude of ways (Freeman et.al, 2010). Since there are ICTs, many tourism products and services such as hotel rooms and flight tickets have been sold and promoted online to consumers to purchase these products and services. Besides that, ICTs allow people to obtain and give information, to promote and influence people through other people’s opinions

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. Also, the experiences, photographs or vlogs provide ideas to the tourists, add fun to the planning process as well as making it easier for the tourists to make decisions after they read on the experiences written as well as see and watch images on what the tourism products, services and destination will be like by the experienced tourists. There are a trend for tourism organization to use social media that provide attractive photos and videos of the destination to attract and persuade the interest of tourists to visit the destination. For instance, Korea Tourism Organization uses the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to attract the tourists to visit South Korea by posting attractive photos and videos of South Korea. Besides that, travel companies also use social media to