Critical review of patterns, roles, and influences of social media in tourism

Abstract

Presently, social media has influenced the tourism industry in various dimensions, especially tourists’ behavior. In this manner, understanding the overall patterns, roles, and influences of social media in tourism is very necessary. This paper provides an understanding of how social media has influenced tourism. The study is divided into two parts. The first part focused on analyzing the patterns and role of social media use in tourism. 95 popular social media and websites related to tourism were analyzed by using descriptive statistics and content analysis. The second part examined the influences of social media on human behaviors. The data were gathered from 113 academic international peer-reviewed journals published during 2013–2021. In addition, 24 research papers were selected to analyze the relationships and the effect size between social media and human behavior by applying meta-analysis. The results showed that the patterns of social media related to tourism were diverse. The most popular social network sites were Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, respectively. The account owners could be classified into four groups. Travel bloggers were the majority group of owners, followed by general users, government institution/state enterprises, and tourism corporations. Additionally, it was found that information from websites and social media related to tourism consequently influenced travel decision making of tourists. Based on meta-analysis, the results confirmed that social media has a strong influence on the subjective norm and intention toward behavior. The results imply that social media will help to encourage more appropriate behaviors in tourists and can be applied to disseminate information to tourists before they visit the destination.