Arya Mohan
I
The author has a Masters in Business Management with Marketing as the specialisation from Mahatma Gandhi University, India. And she has an experience in Socio Economic Research conducted by the central Government of India. Currently pursuing Masters by Research in IT, Carlow.
Paper overview: This paper aims at contributing to the service marketing research field by providing guidance on how social media can serve to enhance customer relations in tourism sector. The review of literature shows that little research has been conducted to study how tourism entities are evolving with the Internet and using social media to market destinations and engage with potential consumers (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010). This study touches upon the gaps that currently exist within social media marketing research and points out the need for future studies to explore the benefits gained by marketing on social networking sites.
Literature: This review examines current literature that focuses on use of social media as an extension of marketing strategy in tourism industry.
Tourism is one of Ireland’s most important economic sector and has significant potential to play a further role in Ireland’s economic renewal (Department of Transport, Tourism and Sport, 2015).
Social media provides new means for tourism organisations including destination marketing organisations to revise and implement their business models and operations, such as development of new services, marketing, networking and knowledge management (Zeng and Gerristen, 2014). Hence, the growing role of social media in tourism has been an emerging topic (Zeng and Gerristen, 2014).
Research Gap: One sizeable gap in the existing literature is research examining the use of social media by tourism industry. Many tourist providers allow their customers to create user generated content; however, practitioners do not interact with customers through this platform (Zeng and Gerristen, 2014). Little research has been conducted to study how tourism entities are evolving with the Internet and using social media to market destinations and engage with potential consumers. Examining the existing literature, this paper, ultimately, tries to address this research gap.
Research Methodology: The proposed research will be qualitative in nature. A purposeful sample of tourism providers will be selected and contacted for the purposes of answering the research questions in a qualitative manner. It is intended that interviews will be conducted with tourism providers across the industry to ‘elicit views and opinions from the participants’ and to gain a deeper understanding of how social media can lead to greater relationship development. The researcher will also engage in an analysis of user generated content to determine the volume of visitor engagement with social media. The study will employ a non-probability sampling technique, judgement sampling.
Implications: This research tries to investigate the degree and nature of interaction between tourism providers and customers, and will offer recommendations to providers on how relationship management can further be developed using social media.
Bibliography:
- Xiang, Z., & Gretzel, U. (2010). Role of social media in online travel information search. Tourism Management, 31, 179–188.
- Zeng, B & Gerritsen, R. (2014). What do we know about social media in tourism?. Tourism Management Perspectives, 10, 27-36.
