The Effects of Social Media on Tourism Marketing: A Study among University Students

Due to increasing popularity of internet applications, many tourism organizations such as hotels, airline companies and travel agencies have started using internet as one of their important marketing and communications strategies. In this way, internet has been one of the strongest elements of competition in tourism sector. Social media has started being used as a new marketing approach within the growing internet technologies by tourism sector. The aim of this study is discussing the importance of social media in tourism marketing. The study is based on a survey implemented on the students of Atilim University evaluating the effects of social media among young generation. The data collection technique of this article is survey analysis. 624 survey forms have been distributed according to the number of students at 6 faculties, but 550 survey forms have been responded. According to the results of the survey, social media has influences in tourism sector both in positive and negative ways, as the tourism decisions of young generation have been strongly affected by comments and personal experiences of other users on social media.