The Impact of Social Media in the Selection of Tourist Destinations: University Students for a Research

Internet, affecting every sector in the world, the tourism sector and interaction between the consumer and the tourism sector has changed. Consumers, separating time and money to buy touristic goods and services, want to live in the negative sense experience without any surprises. For this purpose, the consumers collect about the product/service information from various sources. These sources of information in the past, the traditional media and social environment of the acquired information with limited today, in online environments more comprehensive information is presented. Today, these online environments, most importantly, are the social media platforms. Social media platforms offer the opportunity to reach a very large audience in a short time, on these platforms, the positive / negative images, thoughts about touristic product / service, affects different degrees of consumers in terms of sharing of experiences. In addition, the increase in the use of smart phone consumers, as well as the use of internet social media makes it easier to transport. The purpose of this study is to determine the effect of social media in choice of tourist destination of university students. For this purpose, a questionnaire was developed. The questionnaire in order to improve 50 university students about an hour-long interview made and the meantime, whether they used social media for the selection of a touristic destination, which benefit from social media properties, on the purposes for which they use social media in the process, asked and the answers given in the literature used in conjunction with any item with the support of a total of 30 were obtained. Afterwards, a questionnaire was designed with the support of expert opinion. The questionnaire was prepared, first as a pilot study within the scope of the 100 people applied. After the pilot study, the necessary arrangements have been made and the final version of the questionnaire, face-to-face interviews with 1748 university student was applied throughout Turkey. The obtained data were analyzed with statistical analysis program. According to the results of factor analysis for the analysis of the validity of five different sizes were determined. These are: "Information Sharing", " the Effect of the Members”, "Acquisition of Knowledge", "the Effect of Well-known People" and "Accuracy of Information" dimensions. As a result of the reliability test, the individual dimensions, the number of times the lowest and the highest alpha, was determined to be 79% to 69%. According to the results, social media is seen to be effective in the selection of tourist destination. Participants used social media for the purpose of obtaining information, "Acquisition of Knowledge" as a result of having the highest average size has been determined. In this study, as well as recommendations for future work are presented. Keywords: Destination, Decision-Making Process, Social Media, Information Resources, Destination Marketing, Interne