ONLINE SOCIAL ADVERTISING: PROMOTIONAL ELEMENTS POSTED BY TRAVEL AGENCIES FROM SUCEAVA CITY ON FACEBOOK FRIENDS’ COMMUNITY

Abstract

Like any other business in the travel and hospitality industry, it is essential for travel agencies to establish a good promotion policy, to be most noticeable among buyers of travel packages. The promotion – WOM (Word of Mouth), and especially Social Advertising via social networks offer a new perspective of economic development, based on participatory marketing policies that would break the barriers of classical marketing, perceived by tourists as unattractive and completely outdated socio-morally.

The new policy promoting travel agencies must be built in cyberspace, on account of social networks, which tend to overshadow the traditional ways of tourist feedback. In this relatively new conjuncture, travel agencies in Suceava are forced to adapt, offering potential customers in the online environment, tourism products and presenting highly attractive destinations in informal circumstances, with a seemingly purely informative character.

A research based on questionnaires, which benefited from dissemination on social networks, was carried out with the support of one affable group of 137 friends from Facebook community, and aimed to highlight the effectiveness of online promotion of travel agencies in Suceava and its driving force generated locally. We conclude that people from Suceava who are in the group of friends have constant activity on social networks (especially Facebook), have much knowledge about the travel agencies in Suceava that are active in the virtual environment, but are reluctant when they have the opportunity to sign in with the promotional offers of tour operators. It is therefore imperative that travel agencies in Suceava have a constant interaction with future tourists and respond as quickly as possible to the signals they receive from them, even if, at least for now, locally, there is no culture that fosters such promotion relations - offer for sale - purchase between travel agencies and potential customers, recruited on Facebook.