In Business Class

Welcome to our blog! We are a group of business students from Aberystwyth University in Wales. Here we will look in to the tourism industry and how social media can impact businesses within this field, thanks to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, tourism companies can utilise certain methods, such as advertising and collaboration with influencers to expand their outreach in an attempt to attract new customers.

What is social media? Merriam-Webster defines social media as “forms of electronic communication, such as websites for social networking and microblogging through which users create online communities to share information, ideas, personal messages, and other content such as videos.” Origins of social media Social media platforms as we know them today have their origins in the early noughties. MySpace, an early example of social media was created in late 2003 and within a year had a million monthly active users, this showed the potential outreach these sites could gain. It was around this time that Facebook was created, initially only aimed at students within the founder’s university, it quickly expanded and by 2005 had 6 million users. But it wasn’t just individuals that were signing up, 2007 saw 100,000 businesses having a page on Facebook, this allowed companies to attract new custom and communicate their products and services to a huge number of people at virtually...