Marketing Efforts Related to Social Media Channels and Mobile Application Usage in Tourism: Case Study in Istanbul

Many companies are following and adapting the technological developments in communication area, with high percentage usage ratios of web page and mobile applications based services, even as linking them on the social media channels. Besides, internet usage and social media has been appeared out as an important channel in every sector. Tourism sector is one of the top sectors in this sense and it is adapting these new social media channel and technological communication tools. Almost, every tourism companies in Turkey are updating themselves for catching the new wave. Impressively, internet framework covering the mobile communication is very powerful in Turkey relative to other emerging economies. Moreover, there are not sufficient data which examine the social media effect on the marketing power in Turkey. But, it has become a necessity to analyze social media's role in the manner of marketing and the effects on sales in tourism sector. Another question also appears: Which social media channel is preferred for the marketing efforts in Turkey or which channels are used by companies for CRM based efforts? Mainly, research, tries to examine the social media and electronic communication effect on marketing in tourism sector. Research method is based on qualitative method and data will be collected from hotel managers. Hotels will be selected from Istanbul Hotels in Turkey. The research will describe the framework of social media and electronic communication usage for the marketing purpose of tourism sector in Turkey that gives acceleration to tourism companies in the manner of benchmarking and road mapping for their future efforts. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).