DIGITAL MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA IN TOURISM MARKETING: A LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

Digital technologies and social media platforms have fundamentally reshaped how tourism destinations, organizations, and enterprises engage with prospective travelers, transforming both the strategic planning and operational practice of tourism marketing. This paper presents a literature review of recent scholarship on digital marketing and social media in tourism, synthesizing findings from systematic literature reviews, bibliometric analyses, and empirical studies published predominantly between 2023 and 2025. The review addresses four principal thematic areas: the evolving role of social media in destination image formation and marketing communication; the persistent gap between strategic marketing frameworks and their practical implementation within tourism organizations; the influence of social media influencers and user-generated content on travel decision-making; and the emergence of frontier digital technologies, including the metaverse, artificial intelligence, and immersive media, as new tourism marketing channels. Across this literature, a recurring finding is that while tourism enterprises widely recognize the strategic importance of digital and social media marketing, many continue to apply these tools in an ad hoc, poorly documented manner, with underdeveloped performance measurement and limited integration with overall organizational marketing goals. The review concludes that future research should prioritize the development of structured implementation frameworks and rigorous, comparable measures of digital marketing effectiveness specific to the experiential and intangible nature of tourism products.