An Impact of Social Media on Online Travel Information Search in China

social media websites play more and more important role as information sources for travelers. The paper selects nine Chinese excellent tourism cities as sample with different city level, population size and geographic location, uses six main travel-related keywords to study empirically social media impact on online travel information search by Baidu search engine. The results show that social media websites constitute approximately 50% search results, indicating search engine may directly guide travelers to social media websites. The study emphasizes the growing important of social media in travelers´ online trip planning and provides marketing suggests.