Examining the Effect of Social Media Marketing in Tourism
Authors: 
Hsin-Lu Chang, Dai-Yu WuAuthors Info & Claims
Article No.: 4, Pages 1 - 9
Abstract
A growing number of travel agencies in the tourism industry use social media to promote their services and reach target customers despite some doubt regarding the effectiveness of these tools. Nevertheless, few researchers have examined the effects of social media marketing, and especially its effects on sales. Therefore, our study aims to assess the impact of social media on the purchase of tourism products. Additionally, to explore whether the influence of social media marketing changes among different types of tourism products, we develop a typology of tourism products that classifies tourism along the following five dimensions: (1) the structure of tourism, (2) the involvement of tourists, (3) the scope of tourism, (4) the price of products, and (5) the length of a tour. All tours with Facebook campaigns conducted by our case company from February 1, 2012 to November 30, 2013 are selected as our target tourism products. Moreover, we choose certain products without Facebook campaigns that were available for purchase during the same time period as a control group. We obtain the sales data from the case company and calculate the sales of each product before and after the Facebook campaigns. We then apply a difference-in-difference approach, comparing the average changes in sales performance of the treatment group with those of the control group. The results show that Facebook campaign activities have a positive impact on purchases of tourism products. Furthermore, sales are more likely to increase when a travel agency promotes products that are less structured, limited in scope, relatively lower-priced, or require less tourist involvement.
References
[1]
Advertising Age. (2012). FACEBOOK 101: CAN SUCCESS STRIKE TWICE? 83(33), 2C--3C.
[2]
Ang, L. (2011). Community relationship management and social media. Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management, 18(1), 31--38.
[3]
Baghdadi, Y. (2013). From e-commerce to social commerce: a framework to guide enabling cloud computing. Journal of theoretical and applied electronic commerce research, 8(3), 12--38.
[4]
Bartram, S. A. (2001). Serious leisure careers among whitewater kayakers: A feminist perspective. World Leisure Journal, 43(2), 4--11.
[5]
Beatty, S. E. and Smith, S. M. (1987). External search effort: An investigation across several product categories. Journal of consumer research, 83--95.
[6]
Bernoff, J. and Li, C. (2008). Harnessing the power of the oh-so-social web. MIT Sloan management review, 49(3), 36--42.
[7]
Berthon, P. R., Pitt, L. F., Plangger, K., and Shapiro, D. (2012). Marketing meets Web 2.0, social media, and creative consumers: Implications for international marketing strategy. Business Horizons, 55(3), 261--271.
[8]
Buhalis, D. and Law, R. (2008). Progress in information technology and tourism management: 20 years on and 10 years after the Internet---The state of eTourism research. Tourism management, 29(4), 609--623.
[9]
Bull, A. (1995). The economics of travel and tourism (2nd ed.). Australia: Longman.
[10]
Chen, Y. C., Shang, R. A., and Li, M. J. (2013). The effects of perceived relevance of travel blogs' content on the behavioral intention to visit a tourist destination. Computers in Human Behavior.
[11]
Choi, Y. K. and Lee, J. G. (2012). The Persuasive Effects of Character Presence and Product Type on Responses to Advergames. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15(9), 503--506.
[12]
Dijkstra, M., Buijtels, H. E., and van Raaij, W. F. (2005). Separate and joint effects of medium type on consumer responses: a comparison of television, print, and the Internet. Journal of Business Research, 58(3), 377--386.
[13]
Dolnicar, S. and Leisch, F. (2003). Winter tourist segments in Austria: Identifying stable vacation styles using bagged clustering techniques. Journal of Travel Research, 41(3), 281--292.
[14]
Dwyer, L., Forsyth, P., and Rao, P. (2000). The price competitiveness of travel and tourism: a comparison of 19 destinations. Tourism Management, 21(1), 9--22.
[15]
eMarketer. (2008). Online reviews sway shoppers. Retrieved October 08, 2013, from http://heartbeatofnewmedia.blogspot.tw/2008/07/online-reviews-sway-shoppers.html
[16]
Facebook Studio. (2013). AirAsia Friendsy. Retrieved November 09, 2013, from https://www.facebook-studio.com/gallery/submission/airasia-friendsy
[17]
Fodness, D. and Murray, B. (1999). A model of tourist information search behavior. Journal of Travel Research, 37(3), 220--230.
[18]
Kaplan, A. M., and Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business horizons, 53(1), 59--68.
[19]
Kim, Y. M. and Hawamdeh, S. (2011). The Utilization of Web 2.0 Functionalities on E-Commerce Web Sites. Journal of Advances in Information Technology, 2(4), 190--198.
[20]
Legg, D. and Baker, J. (1987). Advertising strategies for service firms, in Suprenant, C. (Eds.), Add Value to Your Service: 163--8. Chicago, USA: American Marketing Association.
[21]
Lehto, X. Y., Cai, L. A., O'Leary, J. T., and Huan, T. C. (2004). Tourist shopping preferences and expenditure behaviours: The case of the Taiwanese outbound market. Journal of Vacation Marketing, 10(4), 320--332.
[22]
Lew, A. A. (1987). A framework of tourist attraction research. Annals of tourism research, 14(4), 553--575.
[23]
Li, T. and Soonius, G. (2012, December). Is your social media strategy effective? An empirical study of the factors influencing the success of Facebook campaigns. In the Eleventh Workshop on E-Business (WEB 2012), Orlando, USA.
[24]
Litvin, S. W., Goldsmith, R. E., and Pan, B. (2008). Electronic word-of-mouth in hospitality and tourism management. Tourism management, 29(3), 458--468.
[25]
Lo, I. S., McKercher, B., Lo, A., Cheung, C., and Law, R. (2011). Tourism and online photography. Tourism Management, 32(4), 725--731.
[26]
Martínez-Garcia, E., and Raya, J. M. (2008). Length of stay for low-cost tourism. Tourism Management, 29(6), 1064--1075.
[27]
Peterson, R.A., Balasubramanian, S., and Bronnenberg, B.J. (1997). Exploring the implications of the Internet for consumer marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 25(4), 329--46.
[28]
Schmallegger, D. and Carson, D. (2008). Blogs in tourism: Changing approaches to information exchange. Journal of vacation marketing, 14(2), 99--110.
[29]
Shih, C. (2011). The Facebook era: tapping online social networks to market, sell, and innovate. Boston: Pearson Education.
[30]
Sparks, B. A., and Browning, V. (2011). The impact of online reviews on hotel booking intentions and perception of trust. Tourism Management, 32(6), 1310--1323.
[31]
Stafford, M. R. and Day, E. (1995). Retail services advertising: the effects of appeal, medium, and service. Journal of Advertising, 24(1), 57--71.
[32]
Stelzner, M. (2013). 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Retrieved October 12, 2013, from http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2013/
[33]
Stephen, A.T. and Toubia, O. (2010). Deriving Value from Social Commerce Networks. Journal of Marketing Research, 47(2), 215--228.
[34]
Tsiotsou, R. and Ratten, V. (2010). Future research directions in tourism marketing. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, 28(4), 533--544.
[35]
Wang, J. C., and Chang, C. H. (2013). How online social ties and product-related risks influence purchase intentions: A Facebook experiment. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 12(5), 337--346
[36]
Wathieu, L., & Bertini, M. (2007). Price as a stimulus to think: The case for willful overpricing. Marketing Science, 26(1), 118--129.
[37]
Yiannakis, A. and Gibson, H. (1992). Roles tourists play. Annals of tourism Research, 19(2), 287--303.
[38]
Yoon, S. J. and Kim, J. H. (2001). Is the Internet more effective than traditional media? Factors affecting the choice of media. Journal of Advertising Research, 41(6), 53--60.
Index Terms
- Examining the Effect of Social Media Marketing in Tourism
Recommendations
Understanding social media marketing: a case study on topics, categories and sentiment on a Facebook brand page
MindTrek '11: Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media EnvironmentsSocial networks have changed the way information is delivered to the customers, shifting from traditional one-to-many to one-to-one communication. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis offer the possibility to understand the user-generated comments and ...
Will firm's marketing efforts on owned social media payoff? A quasi-experimental analysis of tourism products
A growing number of travel agencies use social media to promote their services and reach target customers despite some doubt regarding the effectiveness of these tools. Nevertheless, most prior studies adopt a customer-centric perspective to explore the ...
Social Media Marketing in Luxury Retail
This study examines the potentials of social media marketing for luxury retailers. Social media marketing tactics of three luxury retail brands Barneys New York, Net-a-Porter.com, and Saks Fifth Avenue were examined across three major social media sites ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
August 2015
268 pages
ISBN:9781450334617
DOI:10.1145/2781562
- Conference Chairs:
- Jae Kyu Lee,
- Robert J. Kauffman,
- Zoonky Lee,
- Karl R. Lang,
- Program Chairs:
- Byungjoon Yoo,
- Ting Li
Copyright © 2015 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
In-Cooperation
- KRF: Korea Research Foundation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 03 August 2015
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Funding Sources
Conference
ICEC '15
ICEC '15: The 17th International Conference on Electronic Commerce 2015
August 3 - 5, 2015
Seoul, Republic of Korea
Acceptance Rates
ICEC '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 39 of 55 submissions, 71%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 654Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)23
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 16 Jan 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in