Abstract
The social networking sites or the social media have enormous number of users. Currently, Facebook is the most used social media on the Internet and is among the most popular websites in Europe and worldwide. National tourism organizations in Europe should capitalize on those facts, especially using Facebook user-generated content. Facebook offers many ways for tourism promotion using features like Pages and Groups. The purpose of this paper is to identify how many NTOs in Europe have an official presence on Facebook and to determine the extent of the use of basic Facebook user-generated content (Pages and Groups). The research results showed that about half of NTOs do not have an official presence on Facebook, almost one-third of them have Facebook Pages, and almost a fifth of them have a Group. Besides the insignificant Facebook presence, NTOs do not use all the advantages that are offered by user-generated content. All trends show that Facebook community will continue to grow. NTOs should consider using Facebook in the next couple of years, as an effective marketing strategy.
Highlights
Millions of computer users worldwide have begun exploring the Internet and have joined one or more on-line communities that have sprung up to serve consumer needs for communication, information, and entertainment (Wang, Yu, & Fesenmaier, 2002)
The purpose of this paper is to identify how many national tourism organizations (NTOs) in Europe have an official presence on Facebook and to determine the extent of the use of basic Facebook user-generated content (Pages and Groups)
The results show that the majority of NTOs in Europe has not realized the importance of user-generated content on Facebook
Summary
Millions of computer users worldwide have begun exploring the Internet and have joined one or more on-line communities that have sprung up to serve consumer needs for communication, information, and entertainment (Wang, Yu, & Fesenmaier, 2002). People have begun using social networking sites to connect to others in a wide variety of ways, including dating, meeting others with common interests, sharing information. As Facebook has increasingly focused its attention on global expansion and increased penetration across countries and regions, the site has catapulted to the six ranked web property worldwide with 275 million visitors in February 2009, a 175% increase versus a year ago. One of the global regions that best shows its growth is Europe, where the site has seen a 314% increase to nearly 100 million visitors (Anon, 2009a). Facebook use is 4.1% of all minutes spent on-line in Europe. Facebook accounts for a full 30.4% of minutes spent in the social networking category (Anon, 2009a)
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