社交媒体时代旅游者行为研究进展——基于境外文献的梳理

A Review of Tourist Behavior Studies on Social Media: Based on Overseas Literature

互联网技术的快速发展正重新塑造着旅游者的行为模式。伴随着现代旅游者越来越倾向于使用社交媒体来支持旅游活动的各个环节,关注旅游者在社交媒体中的行为表现及其影响机制成为境外学者们关注的话题。通过对境外研究文献的系统化梳理和归纳,发现境外关于社交媒体时代旅游者行为研究处于快速发展阶段,研究内容主要聚焦于旅游者使用社交媒体的行为研究,社交媒体对旅游者信息搜寻行为、决策行为、信息分享行为的影响,用户生成内容作为数据源在旅游者行为研究中的应用。未来基于社交媒体的旅游者生成内容激励机制研究、旅游虚拟网络社会研究、目的地信息服务效率、数据获取与处理分析方面还有着广泛的研究空间。

With the rapid development of a new generation of Internet based around so-called Web 2.0 approaches, social media has been integrated into social and economic life in the real world. This is triggering change from the traditional means of information dissemination. Social media includes social networking sites, knowledge-sharing sites, blogs, microblogs, consumer review sites, and virtual communities. Social media outlets have been widely adopted by tourists to search, organize, share, and comment on their travel stories and experiences. Focus on tourists＇ behavior in social media, and the influence mechanism of this behavior, has been a popular topic in foreign tourism research. The present paper reviews and analyzes published foreign research on the subject of tourist behavior studies focused on social media. ＂Social media＂, ＂tourist ＂, ＂traveler＂, ＂social networking＂, ＂web 2.0＂, and ＂user-generated content＂ were used as key words/terms in the search. On December 20, 2015, we selected and searched four major databases： Web of Science, ScienceDirect, EBSCOhost, and ProQuest. The combination of key words/terms ＂ ＇social media＇ or ＇social networking＇ or ＇Web 2.0＇ or ＇usergenerated content＇＂ and ＂＇ tourist＇ or ＇ traveler＇＂ were used. A total of 206 publications were reviewed. By systematic arrangement and induction, we found that the growing role of social media in tourist behavior has continued to increase as an emerging research topic. Three main sub-categories were identified： （1） social media use behavior during holiday travel, （2） the role and influence of social media in online travel information search and tourists＇ decision-making process and knowledgesharing behaviors, and （3） specific tourist behavior studies from social media that are recognized as an important data source. This study suggests that tourist behavior research on social media is still in its infancy. Multiple methodologies are involved in this field. The structural equation model, partial least squares, and social network analysis were used as quantitative tools to analyze online survey data from the perspective of management or economics, which focus on tourist social media use behavior and its mechanisms. From the perspective of sociology, psychology and anthropology, focus group interviews, network ethnography, grounded theory, and other qualitative research methods were conducted on the process of travel behavior and its impact mechanism for exploratory analysis. With user-generated content as data source, content analysis or semantic analysis methods were carried out concerning the specific tourist behavior. It was found that the following aspects should receive greater attention from researchers in the future： incentive mechanism design to motivate more tourists to share knowledge and at a high level of quality, tourism network society analysis, destination information recommendation service efficiency, and data mining and analysis technology from social media resources for tourist behavior research. The present study should be valuable to researchers for better understandings what tourism researchers have recently conducted. Future research efforts can extend the time period of publications and analyze the research findings critically.