With Reference to Best Practice from Your Experience, Explore How Essay

With Reference to Best Practice from Your Experience, Explore How Social Networking (And Particular of Facebook and Twitter) Can Be Used For Tourism Marketing - Essay Example With an overall viewpoint, social networking can be regarded as the grouping of people. It may take place through a face to face communication, but when termed to be as online the communication takes place through social sites, i.e. the websites used for social networking such as the Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, and so on most commonly known as the Web 2.0 (Social Networking, 2010). Online social networking has somewhat the same characteristics as the face to face communication, although with a different mechanism and a higher value in the modern perspective. Evidently online social networking is gaining increasing importance in the modernisation of the business world. Organisations today, in the modern realistic world are tending more towards the inclusion of online social media in their adapted marketing strategies. It is mostly due to the fact that online social networks reward the individuals with an ease to build up relationships with other persons having a common interest in terms of preferences and perceptions. Moreover, the barriers in terms of age group, geographical dimensions, economic status and other variables also have a negative impact while opting for social networking as a marketing tool. ... To face these challenges the utilisation of social networking again proves to be beneficial for the tourism groups (Middleton & Et. Al., 2009). This paper thus focuses on two main questions, i.e. how can the social networking be used to promote a tourism company and what are the pros and cons of this process. Hence, the further discussion of the paper shall be concentrated on the features of two most used social networks, i.e. Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter as Social Media Presently there are numerous social networking sites used by different organisations to promote their business. Few of them are Twitter, Flicr, Facebook, Youtube, Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Orkut and many others. But among them the most targeted social sites are the Facebook and the Twitter. The impact of these social networks can be evidently witnessed all around the world. Facebook This social site was created by Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskocovitz and Chris Hughes in the year 2004. Initially the site wa s started to be used only by Harvard students. But after recognising the actual potential of the site it was expanded for the inclusion of high school students, business groups and other internet users by 2008. Presently the site is ranked as one of the most visited social network sites. During 2008, the company had a base of around 67 million active visitors all around the world. And in the current scenario the site has more than 500 million regular visitors. This is indeed a remarkable achievement of the site. The basic features of Facebook similar to other social sites allow the users to enter their personal information along with e-mail, phone number and