Effect of Social Media on Travelling

Social media and how it changes the world.

Introduction.

The definition of social media is a websites or an application that enable user to create and share content or to participate in social networking. there are platforms for social medias such as Facebook , Twitter , Youtube, Tumblr , Instagram , Schoology and etc. One of the function for Facebook is that one can post a status and pictures while instagram too can upload picture and recording video for 15 second for the world to see. Instagram , facebook too have social networking . Users can leave a comment or if they like their pictures or status. Users can give a “LIKE” too. Social media also can give information to the traveler and also to those who are doing business too. with social media it has changed the world in various ways.

Method of Literature selection.

I have conducted an electronic database search through Tunku Abdul Rahman University College’s digital library and I have used the ACM Digital Library . The keyword that I used in the online database include social media, travels and tourist. I have also conducted searches on the How Big is the Crowd? Event and Location Based Population Modeling in Social Media archive, SocRoutes: Safe Routes Based on Tweet Sentiments archive, Event detection over twitter social media streams archive, Using Social Media to Find Places of Interest: A Case Study archive, GoThere: Travel Suggestions using Geotagged Photos archive and Near2me: An Authentic and Personalized Social

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Media-based Recommender for Travel Destinations. I have chosen only the articles that were published within 5 years ago. The three articles which I have chosen to reference on were selected based on the relevancy to the topic of the essay.

Social media for travelling

Social media is so popular these days and it is frequently used by the young and the old. Some of the purposes of the usage for social media is to get information about traveling, places that are popular and famous, places that usually attract tourists which in other term, it is also called the tourist attraction. One of the function that social media has is called GeoTag. Geotaggingcan help users search and found out all kinds of location-specific information. Social media can also let users check into all the places that they have been to and leave a trace to show and prove that the particular user has been there before. Users can also leave some comments or critiques about the visited places so that the other users can get feedbacks, information and know better about that particular place and maybe too can find out about the services or products provided there, whether or not it is good or bad. Social media is not only for lifestyle, it is also for tourist guidance and to let them know more about the history of the place. As an example, one application that has these functions is called ‘Foursquare’. Social media can also let users share information via twitter to other users so that they can know whether if the route they are taking is experiencing a traffic jam or not so that other users can choose either to go the usual route or go for an alternative way to reach their destination. Social media can too let users share information about the weather condition to others so that other users are able to know whether a particular place is drizzling, raining heavily, sunny, windy, snowing or just nice. Of course in Malaysia, there will not be any ‘snowing’ going on. Anyway, in short social media can let users connect to each other. The other example of what social media can do is that social media can let users know whether if their friends are nearby them via Foursquare check in. Since they are able to know where their friends are and if they found out that their friends are nearby, they could simply just go to where their friends are just to greet and chit chat a little while. The other function of social media is that one can share information worldwide through the internet. In my opinion social media has turned travelling easier and more convenient for travelers around the world. First and foremost, I think that social media can connect people around the world. This is based on the article “How Big is the Crowd? Event and Location Based Population Modeling in Social Media”. It is stated that recently the emerged social network services like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare are some of the largest and fastest growing web communities, offering an immense platform for connecting people (Yuan Liang, James Caverlee, Zhiyuan Cheng, Krishna Y. Kamath 2013). I also think that social media can let travelers and tourist find popular places and events. Based on the writer of “Event detection over twitter social media streams” and “Using Social Media to Find Places of Interest:A Case Study”, they claimed that there are 190 million geotagged Flickr photos and this kind of data is used to detect events, find popular places and tourist routes automatically(Steven Van Canneyt, Steven Schockaert, Olivier Van Laere, Bart Dhoedt 2012) and also in some cases, for example, for crisis management and decision making, monitoring some of the critical events over social streams can let the watch officers to analyze the whole situation carefully and accurately. This enables them to make the right decision based on the details shown over the social streams. They can easily identify what is exactly happening, where that particular event is taking place at and of course, who are those involved in it. (Xiangmin Zhou, Lei Chen 2013). Social media also helps travelers to find out and know more about a particular place based on the writer that writes the article “GoThere: Travel Suggestions using Geotagged Photo”. Assumptions made about tourist attractions is that those are the places that are often photographed and geotagged. Geotags annotated to photos have been exploited and used for many different things. For example, geotags annotated to photos are used for mapping geotags to places and also for suggesting recommendation of travel itineraries (Abdul Majid, Ling Chen, Gencai Chen, Hamid Turab Mirza, Ibrar Hussain 2012). Last but not least, the social media world is so advanced that someone actually created a prototype using social media for recommending places for tourist personal interest. Based on the writers of this article, they claimed that this prototype can allow users to explore, evaluate, and understand recommendations, control recommendation direction and discover informative supporting material (Christoph Kofler, Luz Caballero, Maria Menendez_, Valentina Occhialini, Martha Larson 2011). In my opinion, I think social media is very useful for travelers as it helps a lot in providing useful information, tips and feedbacks one needs for traveling.

Conclusion

In conclusion, social media can do a lot stuffs. It not only can be an immense platform that can help people connect to each other, it can also be an informative space for travelers and tourists to help them find useful information and tips about popular places and events. It really is a great help for the travelers to understand what they should be expecting before they go for a vacation at a particular place. This is how social media changed the world.

Reference

1. Abdul, M, Ling, C, Gencai, C, Hamid, M & Ibrar, H 2012, ‘GoThere: Travel Suggestions using Geotagged Photos’, WWW ’12 Companion Proceedings of the 21st international conference companion on World Wide Web, pp.577-578.
2. Christoph, K, Luz, C, Maria, M, Valentina, O & Martha, L 2011, ‘Near2me: An Authentic and Personalized Social Media-based Recommender for Travel Destinations’, WSM ’11 Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGMM international workshop on Social media, pp. 47-52.
3. Steven, C, Steven, S, Olivier, L & Bart, D 2012, ‘ Using Social Media to Find Places of Interest: A Case Study ‘, GEOCROWD ’12:Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Crowdsourced and Volunteered Geographic Information, pp. 2-8.
4. Xiangmin, Z & Lei, C 2014, ‘Event detection over twitter social media streams’,The VLDB Journal — The International Journal on Very Large Data Bases,Vol.23, pp. 381-400.
5. Yuan L, James, C, Zhiyuan, C & Krishna, K 2013, ‘How Big is the Crowd? Event and Location Based Population Modeling in Social Media’, HT ’13Proceedings of the 24th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media , pp. 99-108.