Discuss About The Influence Of Social Media Choosing Tourist.
The advent of social media and technology has made the tourists’ journey different than the journey used to be. Now, the journey does not rely on the travel guidebook or paper maps to find out the latest destinations. Nowadays, tourists find the information through accessing the internet or social media pages of TripAdvisor, Buzzfeed or the friends’ Instagram photos that depict the experience of latest vacations. As stated by Tuten and Solomon (2017), social media has become the place to access the real-time data from various sources about travel destinations and the people’s approach to plan the trip has changed. Kaur (2016), supported this by saying the path to travel a place; both experience and purchasing of the tickets, has become nonlinear. The tourists just log in to the social media accounts and browse to the friends’ co-workers and influencers pages to find the vacation inspiration and travel log; therefore, it supports the way to discover new destinations. In addition, Sydney has become a targeted tourist destination for domestic and international tourists as the people do not miss the opportunity without visiting Sydney. There are many places where the tourists want to go, such as Sydney Opera House, Sydney Harbour Bridge, Bondi Beach and Darling Harbour. Therefore, the hospitality industry in Sydney has been posted the images of nature and the festive activities on their social media pages to attract the guests. Hotels share their ‘room view’ along with famous tourist spot to attract the guests. The hospitality organisations ask the tourists to share their experience on hotel booking e-commerce, social media and on the hotels’ websites with feedback so that other guests take influence from these.
This paper aims to examine the process of social networking sites can become the main method for gaining the detailed and fast information for the choice of tourism destinations. This paper would focus on the benefits of the social media promoting tourist destinations for reaching the wider audiences in global perspectives. From this paper, the marketing and management departments of the hospitality sector can gain knowledge about developing ad hoc marketing tools and strategies along with benefits of competitive advantage in the industry. This research will be significant from the latest perspective of the young generation as the new generation spend their leisure time on social media pages and they get influenced by the images, posts, news, information and videos shared by their peers and influencers. Therefore, the marketing department of hospitality sectors in Sydney area must understand the importance of running video, audio, images, text and gif across the online environment that can increase the footfall on their hotels and resorts. Social media is now the online communication system that provides information to negatively influence the people or to promote the places, brands, environment or the hospitality organisations. Most importantly, the influence of social media on making choice of a tourist destination is new and this study focuses narrowly on Sydney based hospitality industry; therefore, secondary data are scarce. This paper will be significant to show the importance of social media campaigning and advertisement for the hospitality industry to influence on the tourists’ perception. The tourists can gain knowledge from this paper about the non-formal messages on the social media and sometimes, the posts are wrong and distorted.
The demographic scope of this study are the tourists; mainly the young generation. This study also focuses on the e-marketers who need to understand the importance of social media to gain maximum leads in such competitive environment. The geographical scope of the study encompasses from domestic and the international tourists as social media help the hospitality organisations to reach international tourists as well. In Sydney, many international tourists come for leisure and business purposes. The Sydney based hotels can target these tourists through social media posts, texts, images and offers. People nowadays have enough options to spend vacations across the globes and common people are choosing some off-bit spots where they can enjoy solitude. This study focuses on Sydney based hotels as what the hospitality organisations are doing to attract the tourists to choose Sydney. Temporal scope of the study is that this research will be conducted during June to August 2018, winter as maximum tourists do come during this time.
Millennials plan the trip to visit some specific places; however, 59% of the social networking users who are millennials cancel the specific trip due to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and they plan for other off-bit destinations to travel to avoid crowd as they see on their social media pages (McLennan et al. 2017). 87% of Millennials agreed on Facebook that they use social media for gaining the travelling inspiration as they get easily user-generated content as it impacts on the initial decision (Walker 2018). Sydney based hotels get booking from corporate section; this hospitality industry facing the issue of lack of international leisure tourists. Therefore, Sydney based hotels need to find out some ‘off-track or new’ locations to attract the leisure travellers and millennials.
This research paper mainly focuses on Sydney hospitality industry.
The organisations target the customers and users of social media and sometimes the targeted public may behave in a different way. As stated by Minazzi (2015), the PR team of the hospitality sector can face the issue of customers’ behaviour and the organisations encounter this behaviour like active, reviewer, passive, viral and indifferent. Social media is a powerful communication and these communication channel appeal to the people. Social media platform are making the connection and communication fast and people have little time to talk to people. Therefore, the common people share their information, posts, images, texts and videos through social media. The tourism does not make an exception and people start believing the pictures, videos and experiencing that the people share in social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Nowadays, fewer people visit the travel agencies as the people can get the information through social media and online platform (Walker 2018). People can plan the tourism destinations shared by the peers and friends. The people share the link of tourism destination, by clicking on the link; the people can find the full description of the places (Kim et al. 2017). Changes in the communication and information caused by the internet determine the tourist spots. The tourist can also get information from the friends and family members about the touristic services through interacting online and it has been diminishing the role of traditional onsite travel companies and agencies (Mkono and Tribe 2017). Millennials are using the social media as the mode of information regarding tourism spot and the choice of online users of the tourist spots are influenced by the security offered of the place, assurance and reliability of the service providers. In addition, in recent time, the travel agencies and hospitality industry can attract the guests being visible over social media platforms.
Social Staircase model consists of four steps. In the very first step, the organisations establish the strategy that may support the business. This strategy will help the organisation to achieve the vision and goal of the organisation regarding promotion. The organisation needs to start to risk the money by taking early adoption of the initiative (Kaur 2016). Step 2 is about content strategy and this step helps the organisation to make the presence within in the industry. This step states about values that would be provided to the target audience. The third step is about the tools that are used for communication to the target audiences. These tools can be Facebook, Slide-Share, Twitter, Google Buzz and LinkedIn. The organisations can dig deeper to reach large numbers of audiences through using maximum tools. The organisations of late are using social media analytics tools through which the organisations can get the real-time data and information from all the social media sources. The organisation can compare and contrast the performance of the social media through these web analytics (Ashley and Tuten 2015). Step 4 is about the conversion of the followers of social media into the leads. Through social media, the organisations can listen to the audiences, talk back and listen to the audiences; therefore, social media increases the interactivity and conversion.
The social viral spiral model is based on the Brian Solis Prism and it translates the services and tools to create the social flowers depending on the organisational achievement. The organisation needs to get the idea about the content of spiral (Munar and Jacobsen 2016). The PR team use the social media as three types of spirals; first, the organisation can use the social media to as slow-operation. Medium or value-based spiral uses when the organisation needs to target the audiences. The fast or buzz spiral is used when the organisation launches the new services or products. Some of the things that affect the intensity of the spirals and these are a time of actual publishing, internet behavioural pattern, numbers of friends, amount of social networks, where the customers intend to interact (Hudson 2015).
In the social media, there are various types of communities those are acting in online and the communication strategies are influenced by these. These communities are affinity-based communities, inside company communities, vertical companies and the horizontal communities (Zeng and Gerritsen 2015). Social media has the power to influence the customers to use the services or products of the particular brands. The PR team can encourage the use of branded ‘hashtag’ on Twitter where this campaign helps the organisation to reach maximum guests. 78% of the millennials have the desired experience on the desirable services and the organisations can capitalise the use of campaign promoting through social media. In addition, as stated by Harringan et al. (2015), the hospitality organisations can inspire the travellers during the vacation as 97% of the millennials share the travel photos on social media. Therefore, this photo sharing can change others’ plan as these images are real-time. The organisations in Sydney can encourage the travellers to share the post-trip images and this would increase the brand image of the particular hotel and social media viewers will get the inspiration to visit this place. The travellers are trying to visit mainly what they are watching on the social media (Mkono and Tribe 2017). The hospitality organisations can send the messages to the social media communities. It will inspire the community members to generate maximum leads from the social media as well.
Hospitality industry and the Sydney based Tourism are using the social media to promote the business. However, the social media can mislead the travellers also as sometimes wrong information is shared through social media and imperfect integration of the multiple components of marketing strategy can be the key issue of using social media. In Sydney, the hotels spend almost 5% of their revenues on internet marketing (Munar and Jacobsen 2016). The problem of social media advertising on tourism is about spam advertising and the security issues of the guests. The travellers can pay the travel agencies or the hospitality organisations without keeping any evidence; therefore, this can lead to the issue for the travellers.
Reference List
Ashley, C. and Tuten, T., 2015. Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1), pp.15-27.
Destinations NSW: https://www.destinationnsw.com.au/tourism/facts-and-figures/sydney-tourism-statistics [Retrieved on 25th Apr 2018]
Harrigan, P., Evers, U., Miles, M. and Daly, T., 2017. Customer engagement with tourism social media brands. Tourism Management, 59, pp.597-609.
Hudson, S., Roth, M.S., Madden, T.J. and Hudson, R., 2015. The effects of social media on emotions, brand relationship quality, and word of mouth: An empirical study of music festival attendees. Tourism Management, 47, pp.68-76.
Kaur, G., 2016. Social media marketing. Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Studies, 4(7), pp.34-45.
Kim, S.E., Lee, K.Y., Shin, S.I. and Yang, S.B., 2017. Effects of tourism information quality in social media on destination image formation: The case of Sina Weibo. Information & Management, 54(6), pp.687-702.
McLennan, C.L.J., Becken, S. and Moyle, B.D., 2017. Framing in a contested space: Media reporting on tourism and mining in Australia. Current Issues in Tourism, 20(9), pp.960-980.
Minazzi, R., 2015. Social media marketing in tourism and hospitality. Heidelberg: Springer.
Mkono, M. and Tribe, J., 2017. Beyond reviewing: Uncovering the multiple roles of tourism social media users. Journal of Travel Research, 56(3), pp.287-298.
Munar, A.M. and Jacobsen, J.K.S., 2016. Motivations for sharing tourism experiences through social media. Tourism Management, 43, pp.46-54.
Tuten, T.L. and Solomon, M.R., 2017. Social media marketing. London: Sage.
Walker, J.R., 2018. Introduction to hospitality. Sydney: Pearson Higher Ed.
Zeng, B. and Gerritsen, R., 2015. What do we know about social media in tourism? A review. Tourism Management Perspectives, 10, pp.27-36.
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