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The takeoff of social media in tourism

Over the years, online marketing has grown in importance in the tourism industry. This media space offers companies throughout the tourism value system numerous marketing tools, one of the most recent being social media. Social media allows companies to interact directly with customers via various Internet platforms and monitor and interact with customer opinions and evaluations of services. This exploratory article studies the travel portion of the tourism experience through airlines’ use of social media on two social media platforms for a 6-month time period. The social media content posted by airlines is analyzed and categorized according to the promotional marketing mix. In addition, the authors propose four categories to describe the overall communicative behavior. Among the results, it is shown that there is a lack of strategic perspective among airlines’ utilization of social media as it is being used with limited uniformity. These findings may aid marketing departments in their marketing and social media communication strategies, while complementing current marketing research.