A bibliometric analysis of studies on social media marketing and tourism published in Web of Science Database

Abstract

With the widespread use of social media, the application areas of social media marketing are expanding. Tourism is one of these areas. Especially the fact that consumers include tourist activities in their social media posts has made the necessity of social media marketing inevitable for tourist businesses. This situation enables word-of-mouth marketing, one of the main objectives of marketing, to be realized in the digital dimension. This relationship between social media marketing and tourism has led academics to conduct studies in the related field. This study aims to reveal the importance of studies published on social media marketing and tourism and take a snapshot of the development of studies on this subject. In this context, 234 academic publications on social media marketing and tourism were accessed from the Web of Science (WoS) database covering the period between 2009 and 2024. The publications obtained from WoS were analyzed in terms of number of publications, number of citations, countries of publication, study type, citation topics, WoS index, Web of Science categories, and most chosen keywords, and bibliometric analysis of these publications was performed with VOSviewer software. According to the study findings, there has been a steady increase in the number of publications every year. In addition, the most preferred type of publication is the article. The country with the most publications is the USA, followed by China. Looking at the WoS index, it is seen that most studies are published in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). When the most used keywords are analyzed, the keyword social media marketing is followed by social media. The study results are expected to be instructive for both businesses and academics.