THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN TOURISM

Abstract

As a result of the developments in information and communication Technologies, and their widely and densely use new marketing mediums have recently emerged. A number of platforms have also appeared in product preference in terms of consumers. The masses communicate with each other on social media. Firms are looking for the ways of affecting the preferences of customers, and they use social media as a marketing environment. Today, the competition between firms has raised, therefore most firms find traditional marketing methods inadequate in reaching to their customers. Therefore, they aim to take action in every environment in which customers exist. This situation causes producing firms to; conduct marketing activities in a more number of ways in digital or virtual media. In recent years, in tourism industry hotel services also use social media for purposes such as effective advertisement, reaching more customers and building brand loyalty. Through social media, tourism services can reach to more customer faster. Besides, customers can also quickly reach to tourism services through their social media accounts in the stages of information searching, assessment of alternatives, selecting choices and purchasing. The aim of this study is to explain how hotel services manage their Facebook accounts and which features they use, and to bring forward proposals. For this reason, Facebook accounts of these hotel services has been studied through content analysis method.