THE RELEVANCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AS A MARKETING TOOL FOR NEW TOURISM PRODUCTS

Abstract

Social media marketing can offer a plethora of benefits for promoting tourism products and destinations. Social media platforms have billions of active users worldwide, providing an enormous audience to reach with your tourism products. This allows for targeted marketing to specific demographics, interests, and geographic locations. It enables direct engagement with potential customers through comments, messages, and interactive content. This engagement helps build relationships, trust, and loyalty with your audience, ultimately increasing the likelihood of conversion. Tourism products are inherently visual, and social media platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook prioritize visual content and provide physical evidence which is one of the major components of it.The study looks into the use of social media and its relevance while using social media as a marketing tool to promote and advertise tourism products. With the ever increasing the use of social media and the utility of different social media platforms it becomes imperative to comprehend how these platforms can help tourism products. The data was gathered through a structured questionnaire. It was circulated within Pune city to gather the responses. The sample size for the study of was 152. The statistical tools used to examine the hypothesis created were t-test and linear regression. The results show a strong relationship between physical evidences provided on social media and tourism choices made by the customers. It was also found that Instagram is the most efficient social media platform used as a marketing tool for tourism product. The study was conducted in Pune city and no particular type of tourism product was included.