Studying tourism websites and the effects of online social media

Abstract EN

During the past decade, information technology has significantly changed the way the tourism companies plans, controls and manages operations.

For example, the increased use of Web 2.0, has gradually altering the industry structure and developing a whole range of opportunities and threats.

Hence, the purpose of this study is to verify the impact of online social networks in raising the number of visitors to referenced websites as well as forecasting the total number of tourism websites visitors and social media referrals to better understand and evaluate the potential importance of this technology using time series analysis.

This objective will be achieved through analyzing the pattern of visits to a sample of Egyptian tourism websites and the relationship between the total visits and those having the OSNs as referrals has been measured.

The data analyzed in this study were provided from the secondary data generated by Google Analytics (GA).

The data collected consisted of the series of total visits of Egyptian websites and the contributions of these visits via social media referrals.

The significance of the explanatory variable visits via social media referrals as well as the time period was addressed with a multiple regression.

To forecast the total number of visits to the tourism websites the time series analysis approach as a non causal method has been used.

The results show that time and social media referrals have a significant influence on the total visits of tourism websites.

Moreover, Egyptian tourism businesses should not only consider the presence and interaction on Facebook, Google+ and My space, they should also consider Media sharing platforms such as You Tube and Pinterest.