Value of Social Media for Tourism
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Introduction
Social media is a generic term for online technologies and practices that people adopt to share texts, images, video and audio. Professors Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein define social media as a group of Internet applications based on assumptions ideological and technology of Web 2.0 that enable the creation and exchange of user-generated content (Partridge 2011, 108).
Social media is fundamentally a change in the way people learn, read and share information and content. In them there is a fusion of sociology and technology that transforms the monologue (one-to-many) in dialog (many-to-many) and place a democratization of information that transforms people from the users of content publishers. Social media has become very popular because they allow people to use the web to build relationships for personal or business. Social media are also called user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM) (Qualman 2009, 77).
Social Media vs. Mass media
Social media is derived from the traditional mass media such as newspapers, radio, television and film to differ. Social Media is based solely on digital-based communication channels and applications. It also has relatively low barriers to entry, such as low cost, simple manufacturing processes and easy accessibility of tools for publishing and distribution of content of any kind which are used both for companies and private individuals. Other hand, require extensive resources and mass media production processes to realize publications.
A common feature, of which media and mass media have social, is the possibility of large and small groups of recipients to achieve. For example, a blog post as well as a TV show millions of readers or viewers are to collect revenue, while there is the possibility that no reader or audience can be animated, to deal with the contribution. While mass media as television increasingly on the linear communication a broadcast share, subject to the communication of social media in addition to a high real-time factor and the principle of the Long Tail to generate attention and coverage (Tuten 2008, 45).
Some properties that help in the differentiation, such as:
Range
Both, social media and mass media, allow everyone to have a global presence.
Accessibility
The production of mass media is subjected to private or governmental rule, your own company. Social-media tools are available to everyone at little or no cost.
Production
The production of mass media uses specialized knowledge and requires extensive training. This expression of knowledge in the context of social media is clearly lower than the previous.
Novelty
The period between an event and the publication of mass media, is larger but in the case of social media it allows direct and publishes the content without delay.
Resistance
An article in a mass medium (e.g. newspaper articles) cannot be changed after creation and publication. Social media allows virtually no time delay to make changes to publications.
Almost all companies can benefit from the marketing of social media, but for the tourism industry is especially important. Social media is the Web 2.0 version of the advertising word-of-mouth. However, many travel-related companies have not yet made use of this important marketing tool, probably due to not knowing enough about it. It is rather daunting, especially if you personally have no knowledge of things like Twitter and Facebook (Brow 2008, 84).
Technology
There are a variety of social media technologies in the areas of communication, collaboration, knowledge management, multimedia and entertainment.
In communications, there are weblogs, micro blogging, social networking, social network aggregators, event portals, newsgroups / forums and Instant Messenger.
For collaboration and knowledge management, there are wikis, social bookmarking / social tagging, review sites and information portals (Fernandez 2009, 16).
In multimedia technologies there are the photo-sharing, video sharing, live casting and podcasts common.
In the entertainment industry it has for example, virtual worlds and online games.
Various applications of these technologies can use social media aggregation are combined. Today, weblogs, forums, social networks, wikis and podcasts are the most common social media technologies. Blogs / forums are individualized websites where users discuss and experience, opinions and knowledge on specific topics to share their skills.
Strategies
Below are a few steps that will help people identify which social Medias could be beneficial to your business (Mangold & Faulds 2009, 357).
First identify and monitor the target market that how they exhibit their behavior online and with the social networking tools they interact. Most of the travelers use Google maps, Trip Advisor, Facebook, YouTube and number of other tools that are available online. Make a leverage among these tools and try to seek consultation from experts that which platform to use.
Formulate content in the platforms of social media to target your products towards the potential prospects in such a form that they like the most.
This social media strategy should begin with these three questions
Which areas of the service chain can be improved?
Where can the correct use of the different social media tools have gaps?
What are online information needs of potential customers which they require to meet the travel decision?
International Tourism and hotel chains player should use their resources in an innovative manner. Gadgets have influence only makes sense if they bring significant benefits to customers and ultimately the booking (Mikhailitchenko, Javalgi &Mikhailitchenko 2009, 10).
Connect
In a social media strategy, many businesses forget to make direct links to pages created on various social media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or other Triple advisor. But it is equally important