SAGE Reference

The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Management

Tourism and Social Media

Contributors: Author:Ulrike Gretzel

Edited by: Chris Cooper, Serena Volo, William C. Gartner & Noel Scott
Book Title: The SAGE Handbook of Tourism Management
Chapter Title: "Tourism and Social Media"
Pub. Date: 2018
Access Date: October 29, 2021
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: 55 City Road
Print ISBN: 9781526461131
Online ISBN: 9781526461490
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781526461490.n28
Print pages: 415-430
© 2018 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
This PDF has been generated from SAGE Knowledge. Please note that the pagination of the online
version will vary from the pagination of the print book.
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Tourism and Social Media

Tourism and Social Media

Ulrike Gretzel

Introduction

In the late 1990s/early 2000s the focus of the World Wide Web started shifting from offering static HTML
pages and e-commerce opportunities to creating a Web that emphasized open communication, participation,
information sharing and the serving of Web applications to users; this version of the Web is referred to as
Web 2.0 (Webopedia, 2017). Web 2.0 therefore describes an ideology and a set of technologies that afforded
a more interactive Web. In its beginning, its focus on community, non-professional users, user-generated
contents and sharing stood in stark contrast to the rising dot-com businesses of that time. Tourism played
an important role in the development of Web 2.0, with some of the most popular virtual communities being
tourism-related. Lonely Planet's Thorn Tree Forum was founded in 1996 and brought together travelers who
needed information and those who were willing to share their travel stories and provide recommendations.
Virtual communities catered to the essential need of travelers for word-of-mouth, for filtering the myriad of
travel options, and for advice from like-minded others that tourism providers, online travel agencies and
destination marketing organizations at that time could not offer on their websites.

Virtual communities were a natural extension of earlier social Internet applications like multi-user dungeon
(MUD) games, Usenet groups, bulletin board systems and chatrooms but were different in that users
could easily create personal profiles visible to others, post pictures instead of just text, and conversations
being displayed beyond the time of the posting/interaction. This allowed others to consume user-generated
content without contributing to the conversation; a behavior which was called ‘lurking’ (Rheingold, 1993).
However, it was recognized early on that virtual travel communities fulfilled a variety of needs, from social
belonging, to entertainment, to status seeking, communication and information exchange (Wang et al.,
2002). Virtual travel communities also supported travelers in their desire to tell stories as an essential part
of the post-trip experience (Gretzel et al., 2006). The sudden rise in popularity of blogs in 1999 further
facilitated this storytelling function but also served important documentation and personal reflection needs that
travelers had traditionally fulfilled by writing travel journals (Pudliner, 2007). And importantly, blogs created
a captive and active audience in that people could subscribe to/follow them and leave comments. At the
same time, consumer review sites like Epinions were developed and allowed consumers to publicly rate
and review products. TripAdvisor was founded in 2000 and while initially focused on professional advice,
it also encouraged average travel consumers to leave comments. Not too long after, social networking
sites emerged, which permitted the creation of elaborate personal profiles, encouraged frequent posting
of seemingly irrelevant information (so-called status updates), and the establishment of social connections
visible to others. Because of this emphasis on social networking and reputation/social capital, the term social
media became popular when referring to these emerging Web 2.0 applications.

There are several important insights that can be gained from this brief look back in history. First, social
media is a summary term that describes a growing number of Web applications/platforms with different
functionalities. While it often makes sense to refer to social media overall, it is also important to recognize
the diversity in applications. Second, social media did not appear out of nowhere but emerged from the
participatory nature and sharing culture that permeated the Internet from its beginning. The Web was never
‘not social'. Third, the social media landscape is dynamic and new Web 2.0 applications are continuously
being developed. Some become integrated in existing social media platforms while others become stand-
alone applications. Some social media disappear while others keep adapting. Further, many social media
platforms are created by users for users and only later become commercialized (for instance Facebook and
Couchsurfing). This explains why some social media project a powerful sense of community and why some
users are heavily invested in contributing contents.

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The Social Media Landscape

Social media are websites and applications that use Web 2.0 technology to facilitate content creation, sharing
and social networking. They make it possible for users to create, co-create, subscribe to, discuss, modify
and/or share contents with individuals or a community of known or unknown others without needing to have
technical expertise. User-generated content is a term that is related to social media but is fundamentally
different. It describes the messages/posts/media created by users; however, user-generated content does
not necessarily have to be published on a social medium. Booking.com, for instance, features hotel reviews,
but is an online travel agency rather than a social media platform. Websites can easily import and display
user-generated content from social media (through a so-called application program interface or API). At the
same time, social media are increasingly adopting e-commerce applications and editorial/sponsored content
features. Consequently, it is becoming more and more difficult to identify social media as such and clearly
distinguish them from other types of websites or applications.

Several attempts at classifying social media exist, with the Conversation Prism
(https://conversationprism.com) being one of the most prominent ones. The dynamic nature of social media
requires that these classifications are continuously updated. As a consequence, the frequently cited
description of social media by Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) has become dangerously outdated. Also, while
many social media are global, regional differences do exist, with China's homegrown platforms such as Weibo
and WeChat being the most well-known examples (Ge and Gretzel, 2018). Further, many social media have
adopted the platform concept, meaning that they combine several applications. Facebook, for instance, is
a social networking site but also has community/bulletin board system functions like Facebook groups or
Facebook Events and a chat function through Facebook Messenger. This means that providing classifications
at the brand level has become almost impossible.

At a very high level of abstraction, social media can be classified according to whether they are more specific
or more general in terms of the topic area(s) they cover, the type(s) of content/media they support and on
which device(s) they are accessible (Figure 28.1). Snapchat, for example, is a mobile only platform that
is not topic-specific and predominantly supports visual media (photos and videos), although text and voice
messages are also possible. In contrast, TripAdvisor is topic-specific (travel) but neither media nor device-
specific. Twitch is a video game streaming platform and therefore topic and media-specific but not device-
specific.

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Figure 28.1 Social media classification

Social media also differ in the extent to which content is public by default (e.g. TripAdvisor reviews or tweets),
can be made public or private (e.g. Facebook posts) or is private (WhatsApp message). Further, social media
support various levels of synchronicity in communication. Livestreaming is synchronous, while review writing
is not. Indeed, other than ‘thanking’ a reviewer with a helpful vote, reporting an inappropriate review, or
referring to previous reviews when writing a new review, interactions are not possible in the review section of
TripAdvisor. Only the business being reviewed can respond. Further, reviews are typically only made public
after they have passed checks. In contrast, Facebook Live allows for instantaneous information exchange.

Another way in which social media differ is whether they stress ephemeral (meaning short-lived) or persistent
communication/content. Snaps disappear after a few seconds, Facebook profile pictures are supposed to be
changed regularly, while blog entries are permanent. Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) further distinguish between
social media that require/promote self-presentation and self-disclosure and those that do not. For example,
blogs can be written anonymously and without any reference to the self while LinkedIn permits and actually
encourages the creation of elaborate profiles related to one's skills, background and interests. Yet another
point of distinction is the editability of messages by the poster or others. While a blog entry can be edited by
the person who publishes it, others can only comment. On Wikipedia, everyone who is logged in can edit any
content, no matter who published it. Snaps, once they are sent, cannot be edited, neither by the sender nor
anyone else.

These distinct features of social media mean that they offer users different affordances. An affordance
is defined as ‘the mutuality of actor intentions and technology capabilities that provide the potential for a
particular action’ (Majchrzak et al., 2013: 39). In other words, social media affordances describe what types
of communication needs a particular application or platform supports. Looking specifically at Weibo, Ge et
al. (2014) identify five affordance dimensions: (1) visibility, (2) message format, (3) reachable domain, (4)
meta-voice and (5) informed association. Thinking about social media more broadly, five additional affordance
dimensions can be added, namely identity, discovery, editability, persistence and archivability (see Table 28.1
for descriptions and examples).

Table 28.1Social media affordance dimensions

Affordance
Definition
dimension
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Options for self-presentation (e.g. profile name, picture, description, display of social
Identity
connections, etc.)
Opportunities to search, filter and display content/people (e.g. sort reviews by date, display
Discovery
friends of friends, search for posts related to a particular hashtag, etc.)
Message and activity presentation options: (1) publicly visible, (2) visible to all subscribers, (3)
Visibility
visible to one or more particular subscribers and (4) visible only to self
Opportunities to modify or delete contents after publication; ability to modify only own or also
Editability
others’ contents
Message
Message length and modality (e.g. text only, short video, etc.)
format
Ability to access content only while it is being produced, only for a limited time after it is
Persistence
published/sent, or permanently
Reachable Ability to target a particular section of the social media application/platform on which content
domain appears (e.g. personal wall/story, others’ newsfeed, group, direct message, etc.)
Meta-voice Possible reactions to others’ online activities (e.g. commenting, liking, sharing)
Ability to organize and store messages/content/social connections (e.g. creating albums,
Archivability
establishing friend circles, YouTube channels, Pinterest boards, etc.)
Informed Opportunities to establish connections between individuals, between individuals and content, or
association between contents (e.g. friending, tagging, following, subscribing, hashtagging, etc.)

The particular affordances of a social medium emerge from the application/platform designers’
conceptualizations of the social medium as well as the behaviors and needs/demands of the users. For
instance, Facebook did not initially support searchable hashtags, but users ‘imported’ the practice from
Twitter, and Facebook eventually adapted to meet user needs. Similarly, TripAdvisor introduced an option for
businesses to comment on user reviews in response to the increasing hostility among hotel owners towards
the platform. Due to their specific affordances, social media attract particular users and foster particular
use cultures. This means that new users have to learn not only what is possible but also what contents or
behaviors are appropriate or desirable on a social medium. Some social media like Wikipedia or TripAdvisor
have official content moderators/editors, others only do very basic screening and rely on the community
to police itself. Some (e.g. closed Facebook groups) require verification of characteristics before access is
granted. In any case, like entering a new society or culture, becoming a user of a social medium involves a
process of acculturation. This applies to both consumers and marketers.

Ignoring the affordances and culture of a social medium can have serious consequences; Justine Sacco is
a prominent example of someone who was publicly shamed for her tweet about AIDS before boarding a
plane to South Africa (New York Times, 2015). The meta-voice affordance led to her message being quickly
spread and the association affordance allowed others to associate her and her comment with racism and
white privilege. Because of the visibility and persistence of tweets, angry Twitter users beyond her circle of
followers were not only able to read the tweet in question but were also able to scrutinize other messages she
had posted. Even after deleting her post, the message lived on in the tweets of other users who had shared
it.

Last but not least, social media differ in their underlying business models (Table 28.2). Some carry on the
original spirit of social media and are completely volunteer-based, others (e.g. Wikipedia) rely on donations.
Most social media, however, are run with commercial interests in mind. Many start out with venture capital
funding and hope that their start-up will eventually be sold. Others follow a ‘Freemium’ model, which means
that basic functions are available for free while premium services can only be accessed by paying users (e.g.
LinkedIn). Some private social networking sites follow a pure subscription model where even basic functions
are only available to subscribers. Other social media support sponsored content or offer featured listings for
a price. Advertising models are also very common. Affiliate marketing models mean that social media get a
commission for referrals/driving traffic to other websites. Virtual goods (e.g. special emoticons, stickers, avatar
designs, etc. that one has to buy) offer another source of revenue for social media. An increasingly popular
business model is data-licensing (e.g. Twitter Firehose) and, related to that, revenues derived from selling
data analytics (e.g. Foursquare). Platforms like Facebook or TripAdvisor usually have complex business
models with diverse revenue streams (Yoo et al., 2016). The use experience and use culture of a social
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medium depend greatly on the implemented business model(s).

Table 28.2Social media business models

Business
Description
model
The content as well as hosting and maintenance of the social medium is provided by volunteers
who derive mostly social and psychological benefits from helping sustain the application or
platform. This becomes increasingly difficult as the social medium grows, and this model is thus
Volunteers
more typical in the beginning phases. However, all social media rely on voluntary work to some
extent as users are typically not compensated for the contents they create and the digital traces
they leave on the social medium.
Venture Many social media seek venture capital funding to initiate their app/platform with the promise of
capital yielding big returns in investment once the social medium is sold or goes public.
Operational costs are covered with donations from users, benefactors or government grants.
Donations Common for social media that provide services related to public goods (e.g. citizen science
applications).
Basic services are offered for free while more sophisticated functions (e.g. advanced search)
Freemium
are only available to those who pay a fee.
The social medium is only accessible to those who establish an account and pay or agree to
Subscription
some other form of exchange (e.g. personal data being sold to marketers).
A fee is charged for content to be displayed on the social medium (e.g. bloggers receive some
Sponsored
form of compensation from destinations to write about the wonderful travel experiences to be
content
had at the location, or companies pay to be featured in Snapchat filters).
Featured Social media charge money for content to be displayed in prominent areas of the application/
listings platform or to otherwise expose a great number or targeted group of users to it.
Video commercials, banner ads or other forms of display ads are shown to those who visit the
Advertising
social medium or try to access specific contents.
Affiliate
Social media receive a compensation for driving users to particular websites.
marketing
Virtual Users pay (usually small) fees to acquire special content or functionality, e.g. stickers,
goods backgrounds, avatar moves.
Data-
The social medium charges for access to its data, sometimes via third-party providers.
licensing
Data
The social medium charges for insights derived from its data.
analytics

No matter what the business model is, social media's existence depends on user activity. They therefore
implement different persuasion strategies to encourage users to visit their sites/apps, engage with contents
(e.g. like, share, comment on) and ideally also create and post contents. Push notifications that alert users
when new content is available are one example. TripAdvisor's achievement badges for users that post a
certain type and amount of content are another. Elevating users in status (e.g. editors of particular threads
or destination experts in TripAdvisor forums) is another strategy. Making the premium subscription of a user
visible to others is also an option used. Showing users statistics (e.g. Facebook telling users that their posts
are achieving high levels of engagement or Researchgate offering summary statistics of all interactions with
one's profile) further motivates to produce more content. Finally, indicating the extent to which one's profile is
complete is a strategy specifically aimed at encouraging users to provide more information about themselves
(which is critical for social media that depend on offering targeted advertising opportunities).

Social Media Adoption, Use and Users

Internet use and mobile phone use have become almost synonymous with social media use. In North America
Facebook is used by 88% of Internet users (Internet World Stats, 2017). A recent survey finds that 46% of
Americans (66% of American Millennials) check their smartphones before even getting out of bed and that
it is mostly social media apps that they engage with (Tech Times, 2017). Statista (2017) reports that there
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are currently about 600 million social network users in China and this number is expected to grow to over
700 million in the next five years. Globally, Facebook has almost 2 billion monthly active users and thus
remains the most important social medium worldwide (Socialbakers.com, 2017). These numbers illustrate
how pervasive social media use is around the globe. With travelers generally being more highly educated
and well-off than the general population, social media penetration can be assumed to be even higher among
travel consumers. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that there remain substantial numbers of people
and businesses that are not on any social media. Bobkowski and Smith (2013) term this the ‘social media
divide'. While the phenomenon of social media non-adoption has been explored to some extent for tourism
businesses (Gretzel et al., 2014), there is currently very little information on it for travel consumers and
regarding its impacts on travel experiences.

Even among social media users, major differences exist in terms of extent and type of use. Trust has been
identified as a particularly significant factor that influences not only adoption for travel purposes but also
use and benefits derived from social media (Yoo et al., 2009). Choe et al. (2017) point out that the nature
or pattern of social media use varies substantially between travelers and across the trip experience, with
travelers relying on idiosyncratic social media repertoires. This also applies to business users: Yang and
Wang (2015) as well as Hamill et al. (2012) describe considerable differences among destination marketing
organizations (DMOs) in terms of extent/breadth of platform use and frequency of posting. Hammedi and
Virlée (2018) criticize the often simplistic division of social media users into lurkers and posters and call for
a more nuanced understanding of the different social media use behaviors. Confirming this need, Linton
et al. (2017) have recently identified extreme variations in travelers’ social media contributions, with some
TripAdvisor members emerging as super contributors.

Differences also exist in terms of motivations to create user-generated content and share it with others on
social media. Why travelers share on social media has been investigated by a number of tourism scholars
(e.g., Yoo and Gretzel, 2008; Parra-López et al., 2011; Bronner and de Hoog, 2011, 2016; Munar and
Jacobsen, 2014). The results indicate that motivations vary from altruistic desires to help others (including
helping businesses) to hedonic enjoyment, social status seeking and venting/hoping to receive better service.
Yoo and Gretzel (2011) suggest that motivational drivers to post differ based on the personality of the social
media users. Further, social media users not only diverge in why they post but also what they post and
how they evaluate tourism products. Schuckert et al. (2015) illustrate that cultural differences contribute
significantly to these variations in user-generated content creation. Magasic and Gretzel (2017) further
demonstrate the impact of varying levels of Internet connectivity on social media use. In summary, travelers
differ substantially regarding if, why and how they use social media. Understanding social media use thus
requires recognition of the diversity of social media users in terms of demographic, cultural and psychological
characteristics, needs and preferences, as well as access.

Social Media and their Role in Tourism

While social media play an increasing role in all aspects of life and society and in all industries, they play a
particularly central role in tourism. As indicated earlier, tourism was selected very early on by social media
developers as an important application area. One of the reasons for this is that tourism is an information-
intensive industry and was already at the forefront of e-commerce developments when social media entered
the playing field (Werthner and Klein, 1999). Another reason is the hedonic and social nature of tourism.
Recording, recalling, sharing and talking about travel experiences are enjoyable and socially important
activities. Information asymmetries in tourism and the experiential, high involvement and high-risk nature of
tourism consumption constitute other reasons for the ‘natural fit’ between tourism and social media. Due
to these characteristics of tourism, tourists have always heavily relied on personal sources of information
(i.e. word-of-mouth) to make or at least inform their decisions. Social media enable electronic word-of-mouth
(eWOM), which is different from traditional word-of-mouth in that it is asynchronous, many-to-many and not
limited to one's personal social circle (Litvin et al., 2008). Also, social media not only provide a space for the
creation and widespread sharing of eWOM but further enrich its content by supporting the easy upload and
distribution of multimedia contents and by providing important cues about the sources of information (e.g.
through profile pictures, activity statistics and the display of social connections) and the quality of the eWOM
(e.g. through helpfulness votes). In addition, social media make eWOM searchable, e.g. one can search for
uploaded photos related to a specific attraction or filter hotel reviews based on recency.
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As such, social media now play a significant role as information sources for travelers. Xiang and Gretzel
(2010) confirmed early on that because of the search-engine friendly nature of social media platforms,
travelers are also more likely to find social media-related information sources when searching for information
online. Because social media are increasingly accessed via mobile devices, this informational role of social
media now extends to the en route phase of travel, meaning that they are increasingly used during the
trip to guide decisions or provide interpretation (Fotis et al., 2011) and therefore not only influence where
tourists go but also how they experience their destinations. Last but not least, the ability to collect and
save information on social media means that social media play an important role in the documentation of
experiences, represent external memory (Gretzel et al., 2011) and serve ongoing information search needs
(Fodness and Murray, 1999).

Social media also serve as entertainment. Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier (2009) illustrate how travel contents
on social media encourage daydreaming, stimulate fantasies, evoke nostalgia and transport consumers into
exotic locales. Because of the richness and personal relevance of social media contents, it is possible to
have vicarious experiences. In this sense, social media offer quasi-trial experiences but can also virtually
satisfy immediate escape needs. However, consuming travel-related contents posted by others can also lead
to what has been coined as ‘Facebook envy’ (Taylor, 2017). Further, while social media users often post
travel-related contents to help others or to share experiences with loved ones, they also report that they
derive a lot of enjoyment from the process (Gretzel et al., 2011). Kim and Fesenmaier (2017) demonstrate
that such sharing not only entertains but also leads to more positive evaluations of the past travel experience
and therefore fulfills an important psychological function. Di Pietro et al. (2018) emphasize the role of social
media consumption as entertainment during waiting experiences while traveling, suggesting that experiences
at airports, restaurants or in waiting lines at attractions have been fundamentally transformed because of
social media use. The entertainment role of social media therefore extends across all phases of the travel
experience, from dreaming to planning/booking to consuming and recollecting.

Social media facilitate new forms of sociality (Munar et al., 2013). First, they make it possible to stay
connected with home (White and White, 2007). Second, social media also allow one to symbolically take
others along when traveling by documenting the trip in real-time and engaging in conversations with others,
which serves entertainment as well as social and safety purposes. Mascheroni (2007) argues that social
media use while on the move reconfigures notions of co-presence, proximity and distance. Third, they allow
one to connect with others while traveling. These others can be other travelers or locals. Geolocation plays an
important role in this, as it allows one to see who else is nearby. For example, Lean and Condie (2016) explain
the role of the social media app Tinder in facilitating (and actively promoting) what they call Tinder tourism,
i.e. the use of social media to meet up/hook up with others while traveling, and contend that it challenges the
boundaries between online and offline tourism experiences, ‘here’ and ‘there', and hosts and guests. Luo et al.
(2015) illustrate how instrumental social media are to the phenomenon of ‘donkey friends’ in China and more
generally to the emergence of the Chinese backpacking community. Neuhofer and Buhalis (2018) describe
the case of the KLM social seating initiative, which allowed flyers to be seated together based on matched
interests to enrich the social aspects of the in-flight experience. Last but not least, social media allow travelers
to stay in touch and to exchange photos, etc. with those they meet while traveling, therefore extending the
temporal dimension of travel sociality.

An important role of social media in tourism that has received little attention in the academic tourism literature
is the provision of opportunities for consumers to organize and protest (Segerberg and Bennett, 2011).
A prominent example of consumer activism on social media is the ‘United breaks guitars’ case (Carroll,
2012), as is the more recent incident of a United Airlines customer posting a video on Twitter showing
someone being dragged off a plane (New York Times, 2017). Other instances include the use of #boycott in
combination with destinations like Hawaii and Arizona to mobilize consumers against travel to these states
(Destinations International, 2017). Hardy et al. (2013) present the case of recreational vehicle travelers uniting
via virtual communities in an effort to change local policies while Shao et al. (2012) report on Chinese
voluntourists who organize charity-related trips via social media. Social media also play a significant role in
the recent mobilization of anti-tourism sentiment in communities across Europe (The Independent, 2017).
These examples illustrate how social media lend a voice to those who might not have direct access to
traditional media, or whose voices are often overheard in political processes, and help individuals coordinate
actions. This political power of social media (Shirky, 2011) creates a lot of challenges for tourism businesses
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and policy-makers who ignore the new public sphere they create or underestimate how quickly and widely
messages can spread on social media.

So far this section has focused on the role social media play for consumers, but social media have
also become integrated into the fabric of the tourism industry and play significant roles in supporting the
business of tourism. Their role as advertising and promotion tools is obvious as many social media platforms
specifically offer advertising opportunities to businesses; but, as Gretzel and Yoo (2013) suggest, social media
affect all areas of marketing, from product design to performance measurement. For instance, Sigala (2012)
describes the many opportunities for new product/service development using social media to involve existing
and potential consumers of tourism products/services. Crowdsourcing strategies and crowdfunding platforms
further enable this role of social media as sources of innovation for tourism businesses. Social media also
increasingly play a role in the distribution of tourism products/services by supporting social commerce.
Businessdictionary.com (2017: n.p.) defines social commerce as ‘a form of electronic commerce which uses
social networks to assist in the buying or selling of products. This type of commerce utilizes user ratings,
referrals, online communities and social advertising to facilitate online shopping'. That ratings and reviews
influence consumer decision-making has been well established in the literature (see for instance Vermeulen
and Seegers, 2009; Ye et al., 2009; Sparks and Browning, 2011; Mauri and Minazzi, 2013; Phillips et al.,
2017). Social commerce features play an especially important role for tourism products/services distributed
via daily deals websites, on which tourism and hospitality related offers often constitute the majority of deals
(Ditta-Apichai et al., 2013).

Social media further allow tourism operators and destinations to provide customer service in new ways and
at new levels, with most businesses now monitoring social media in order to identify problems and mitigate
complaints (Sparks and Bradley, 2014). Social media further offer opportunities to engage with existing
and potential customers beyond transactional interactions, permitting new ways of customer relationship
management. Gretzel and Fesenmaier (2012) indicate that while consumers enter mostly functional
relationships with travel companies on social media aimed at obtaining information and discounts, they follow
destinations on social media platforms to be entertained and express emotional attachment. Consumers
voluntarily entering such relationships with companies on social media open up opportunities for permission
marketing (Godin, 1999) and engagement. Cabiddu et al. (2014) suggest that social media afford different
forms of engagement, making it possible but also desirable for companies to personalize their engagement
with consumers, engage on a continuous basis but also take advantage of opportunities provided by
customers (e.g. someone tagging the company in a post). Dijkmans et al. (2015) show that successful
engagement with customers via social media has significant consequences for a company's reputation.
Successful engagement is also seen as instrumental for offering co-creation opportunities (Chathoth et al.,
2016). Gretzel and Dinhopl (2014) advise that companies cannot take relationships with consumers on
social media for granted, as many will ‘defriend’ or ‘unfollow’ companies who do not carefully manage the
engagement. The ultimate goal of customer relationship management on social media is to cultivate involved
consumers who not only like and share contents, therefore making them visible to their personal social
networks, but also create contents that portray the company in a favorable manner. Due to the importance
of eWOM, successfully driving customer engagement has become a significant concern for tourism providers
and destinations (So et al., 2016; Ge and Gretzel, 2017).

A company-related role of social media that has been largely neglected in the tourism literature is the use
of social media in the context of human resources management. Only a few papers discuss social media
use in this context (e.g. Madera, 2012; Ladkin and Buhalis, 2016). Gibbs et al. (2015) specifically address
the significance of social media for recruiting, hiring and communicating with employees in hospitality and
tourism firms. Not only can companies obtain more information about current and future employees, they
also have to be concerned with opinions expressed by employees on social media and need to put social
media use policies in place. Additionally, social media provide those who work or want to work at a particular
company with important information regarding its reputation and work environment. Social media also allow
employees to organize and exchange information. Sometimes this is actively encouraged by the company,
with Starbucks serving as a prime example in the hospitality industry. Davidson et al. (2011) suggest that
social media will become even more important for human resources management in tourism and hospitality
as new generations enter the workforce.

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A role that has been widely recognized in the tourism literature is the importance of social media for crisis
communication and management. On the one hand, this pertains to a company's ability to effectively use
social media to spread public relations messages aimed at preventing or managing a crisis (Sigala, 2011).
Hvass (2014), for instance, illustrates the use of social media by airlines during the 2010 ash cloud crisis.
On the other, the literature discusses broader implications for connecting with tourists via social media during
crisis periods. Schroeder et al. (2013) suggest that travelers are likely to turn to social media during a
crisis because of their prominent use of smartphones during travel, their reduced access to traditional media
devices such as radio compared to residents and their greater risk perceptions and therefore increased
information needs induced by their unfamiliarity with the destination and with organizations that could provide
help. Social media providers have developed tools that allow individuals to mark themselves safe during crisis
events, contributing to efforts to account for individuals. This is especially important for tourism, as tourists
might not have left others with information regarding their whereabouts.

Social Media Impacts

Due to the many roles social media play in tourism, their impact is widespread and manifold. It is generally
assumed that social media use enhances the tourist experience (Neuhofer et al., 2014). However, research
increasingly indicates that impacts reach beyond supporting the functional aspects of tourism experience
consumption and are starting to fundamentally change tourism practice. Dinhopl and Gretzel (2016)
investigate selfie-taking and suggest that it directs tourists’ gazes and changes the way they frame
destinations; importantly, the tourism experience becomes a performance for a social media audience and
is staged accordingly. Lo and McKercher (2015) also indicate that social media use requires constant
impression management and therefore scrutiny of what is consumed, how it is portrayed and whether it is
shared. Several scholars also argue that technology use/Internet connectivity in general and social media use
in particular can distract from tourism experiences (Song and Kim, 2017), hinder the ability to truly escape
from ordinary life (Mackay and Vogt, 2012; White and White, 2007), and lead to the loss of important skills
and opportunities to learn and socialize (Pearce and Gretzel, 2012). As a result, some tourists now actually
try to use travel experiences to disconnect from social media (Dickinson et al., 2016).

From a business perspective, social media have in many ways leveled the playing field for small destinations
and tourism providers. Creating an online presence is not only easy but also cheap. It is also important
to recognize that even if businesses cannot or do not want to engage with social media, consumers
will still post contents about them, thus creating an online presence for them. For better or worse, this
means a lot more exposure and transparency for tourism businesses. Social media have also fundamentally
changed consumer-business relationships, with consumers now being conceptualized as co-designers and
co-promoters of tourism products and services. This requires a new and creative approach to marketing
(Gretzel and Yoo, 2013) and not all businesses have realized this. It is extremely difficult for businesses to
keep up with the vast and ever changing social media landscape and its new marketing opportunities. Many
businesses and destinations further do not realize that setting up a social media profile is not enough. While
the creation of a social media presence is free, its successful use for marketing requires human resources
or paying for the services of an agency. Further, as social media platforms change their algorithms to better
serve their own business models and more players enter the already crowded social media space, it has
become ever more difficult to organically appear in social media users’ feeds, meaning that businesses have
to increasingly pay to reach their attention-poor social media targets. Very little literature currently exists that
looks into social media practices of tourism businesses beyond adoption. Wozniak et al.'s (2017) recent paper
is an exception and shows that the monetary and manpower resources dedicated to social media marketing
are modest and that the achieved outcomes are generally weak.

One of the most wide-reaching impacts social media have had so far is enabling the reputation economy
(Hearn, 2010). The premises of the reputation economy are that one's reputation or following on social
media directly influence one's potential for economic gains and that one's reputation can be managed (and
maybe even bought – see discussions on fake reviews and fake followers in the mainstream media). This
implies that reputation management is critical for success and requires professional approaches. As Dickinger
and Lalicic (2017) demonstrate, not many tourism providers currently live up to the task. The reputation
economy also implies that reputation becomes a fundamental element of all market exchanges. Reputation
enables trust in unknown exchange partners. As such, the notion of reviews of businesses (and people)
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by others that started with social media now fuels the emergence of lateral exchange markets (Perren and
Kozinets, 2018), like Couchsurfing and Airbnb. Another major impact of the reputation economy is that it
gave rise to the phenomenon of social media influencers, who now take on important roles as content
creators and intermediaries between tourism businesses/destinations and consumers. Influencer marketing
has consequently become a significant aspect of social media marketing in tourism (Gretzel, 2018).

Social Media and Research

Social media are intricately linked to the big data phenomenon as social media encourage frequent
interactions and often add time and location information to user-generated contents. The general high
visibility, accessibility and persistence of social media data mean they are a goldmine for research. Web
scraping tools make it possible to harvest large amounts of data from social media sites that do not offer their
data via an API. While the data technically belongs to the provider of the social medium, it is generally seen
as being public and therefore available for fair use in academic research. Data scraping that puts a heavy
load on the social medium's server is, however, usually not permitted and often technically prevented (e.g. by
limiting how often the server can be accessed within a certain timeframe). Analyzing the data for commercial
purposes also requires permission and often payment. Many tourism providers neither have the expertise
nor the resources to collect social media data. They typically rely on commercial social media monitoring
tools that not only scrape but also to some extent analyze the data across multiple social media and neatly
present it in the form of dashboards. Free monitoring tools are often provided by the social media platforms
themselves (e.g. Facebook Insights) and nowadays form an integral part of measuring the effectiveness of
social media marketing campaigns.

Advances in data mining and text analytics/natural language processing have led to a shift in social media
research from manual content analysis or simple co-occurrence extractions (Stepchenkova et al., 2009) to
more sophisticated big data mining and text analytics that use machine learning techniques to process natural
language and condense information using clustering approaches (Xiang et al., 2015). While these techniques
become ever more reliable, they still struggle with the particularly creative language used on social media
and are not readily available for all languages. Also, the ever more pronounced visual turn of social media
(Gretzel, forthcoming) challenges automated mining approaches as the accurate decoding of image contents
is still a problem. Current tools available to industry and academia largely rely on image tags to process visual
contents. An alternative approach used by social media researchers is to crowdsource ambiguous coding
from humans via platforms such as MTurk or Fiverr. Difficulty in applying these big data approaches arises
from the increasing move from public to private interactions on social media, with Facebook Messenger,
Snapchat, WhatsApp and WeChat being prominent examples. Further, while data mining helps in discovering
patterns, it fails to provide deeper understandings. Qualitative approaches to analyzing social media data like
netnography (Kozinets, 2015) therefore continue to play an important role in social media research and are
increasingly applied to research seeking an understanding of tourism-related topics (Mkono and Markwell,
2014).

Social media research requires a different way of thinking about data (Quan-Haase and Sloan, 2017) as
data is widely available but also incredibly noisy. To assume that Twitter data, for instance, represents
public opinion is rather naïve given the many different user types (ranging from consumers to influencers,
organizations and automated bots), the particular characteristics of content creators, and the various
motivations that drive posts. Xiang et al. (2017) demonstrate that data reliability is a significant issue that
needs to be further explored. Sampling and ethics are other aspects that have not been sufficiently addressed
in the literature. Thus, while the techniques to collect and process social media data have advanced, there is
still a lot of progress to be made.

Conclusion

Social media have significantly impacted and continue to change travel behaviors and experiences as well
as tourism businesses/destinations and their offerings and strategies (Leung et al., 2013). Recent literature
reviews suggest that there is a growing body of research that informs our understanding of social media in
tourism but also point out shortcomings in terms of underused methodologies, neglected research areas and
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lack of synthesis/systematic approaches (Zeng and Gerritsen, 2014; Sotiriadis, 2017; Lu et al., 2018). The
social media dynamics and complexities described in this chapter call for more refined conceptualizations of
social media, their users and use contexts as well as for the continuous updating of research findings across
all dimensions of social media use by consumers and businesses. The discussions in this chapter make it
clear that a comprehensive and updated knowledge of social media is not only important for a theoretical
understanding of contemporary tourism but is pertinent to the success of the tourism industry. While specific
platforms and use behaviors might change in the near future, social media will continue to affect all aspects
of tourism and all stakeholders, whether they are actively engaged in them or not.

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