The extent of use of basic Facebook user-generated content by the national tourism organizations in Europe

1. IntroductionMillions of computer users worldwide have begun exploring the Internet and have joined one or more on-line communities that have sprung up to serve consumer needs for communication, information, and entertainment (Wang, Yu, & Fesenmaier, 2002). People have begun using social networking sites to connect to others in a wide variety of ways, including dating, meeting others with common interests, sharing information. Chung & Buhalis (2009) point out that users participate in virtual travel communities for a wide range of purposes, which may include fun, companionship, and demonstration of expertise, enjoyment, and amusement as an end in itself. Social networking has made it simple to develop relations that transcend age, race, culture and geographical differences (Graham, Faix, & Hartman, 2009).In the past couple years Facebook is one of the most visited websites in the world, and the most visited social networking website (White, 2009). In April 2009, Facebook announced that it had reached 200 million members, and barely over three months later, in July the number of members rose to 250 million (McEntegart, 2009). As Facebook has increasingly focused its attention on global expansion and increased penetration across countries and regions, the site has catapulted to the six ranked web property worldwide with 275 million visitors in February 2009, a 175% increase versus a year ago. One of the global regions that best shows its growth is Europe, where the site has seen a 314% increase to nearly 100 million visitors (Anon, 2009a). At the same time, nearly 60% of European on-line consumers are involved in social computing (Kemp, 2007). Facebook use is 4.1% of all minutes spent on-line in Europe. Facebook also accounts for a full 30.4% of minutes spent in the social networking category (Anon, 2009a).These facts cannot be ignored by national tourism organizations (NTOs) which have an important role in creating awareness among international and national markets. Different travel and tourism organizations are beginning to realize the importance of using the power of on-line communities (Wang & Fesenmaier, 2003). Using the power of social media, NTOs are encouraging residents, local businesses, visitors and third-party suppliers to tell the destination's story. NTOs can create and sponsor their own pages, groups, pay for advertisements, run polls, create applications that users can include on their own pages.Despite the growing popularity of Facebook and it currently being the most influential social medium in the world, there are no significant studies that had examined the use of Facebook by NTOs. In travel and tourism, past research has focused attention on the sociopsychological aspects of social media use (Illum, Ivanov, & Liang, 2009). Therefore, this paper fills the gap by presenting research on the extent of use of Facebook by NTOs. The focus of this paper is on Facebook Pages and Groups, which represent user-generated content (UGC - content that is created, edited, viewed, and shared by users in Web 2.0 (Carrera, et al., 2008)). By using Groups and Pages, NTOs act as Facebook users. NTOs do not have to pay for such promotion, which gathers communities of costumers and influences travellers' booking decisions (Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Hennig-Thurau & Walsh, 2003; O'Connor, 2008; Pan, et al., 2007). In this paper, the authors will examine how many NTOs in Europe have official presence on Facebook and determine the extent of use of basic Facebook user-generated content (Pages and Groups).Social media and tourismSocial media are an emerging technology that is beginning to have a significant influence on how people communicate (Andrad & Hilary, 2009). While there is a lack of a formal definition, "social media" can be generally understood as Internet-based applications that carry UGC, which encompasses media impressions created by users, typically informed by relevant experience, and archived or shared on-line for easy access by other impressionable consumers (Blackshaw, 2006). …