The Influence of Social Networks in Travel Decisions

Abstract

Social networks are not the same as they were 10 years ago. Now, in addition to the role of “socialization”, their basic role, marketing has also intervened. Marketing can be defined as the art of identifying and satisfying customer needs while producing profit. Nowadays, through social media marketing, a company can promote itself or present products and services very easily, while being able to target exactly the desired people, which translates into making more profit. Our paper provides arguments on the influence of social media in travel decisions, and it’s based on a study of consumer behaviour in this field. The study began from our interest in the way social networks influence our personal decision to travel, to visit a certain area or a certain landmark, so we wanted to find out more information about how this “hypnosis” works. The main hypothesis of the study was that people are influenced by social networks in their travel decisions and according to the results, the hypothesis was confirmed. 91.35% of the total participants in the study were tempted to travel because of a photo seen on a social network, therefore, a good social marketing campaign could really make a difference in travel decisions.

Keywords

• marketing research
• consumer behaviour
• social networks
• tourism
• m31-marketing
• z31 - industry studies