APA RESEARCH PAPER

Social Media Application in Travel

Social Media Application in Travel

Over the last few years, online social networking communities have become a global phenomena. This paper describes two social networks—Facebook and LinkedIn—outlining their value delivery process.

IntroductionDuring the late 1990s and early 2000s, most of the communication was through e-mail, instant messaging and cell phones. Nowadays, most college students are using a host of communication technologies such as blogs, video and photo messages, and other technologies to discover new friends and to keep in touch with them (Stutzman, 2006). A social networking community combines all these and newer communication technologies, and provides an opportunity to contribute one's opinions, interests and skills to the largest creative work ever built by mankind: the Internet (Post, 2007).

The core value proposition of any social networking community is connecting and communication with people (Karp, 2007). Using new technologies, these communities have made possible new ways of meeting people, checking on loved ones, spreading ideas, all from the comfort of one's home or work computer. Initially, social networking communities were a teenage phenomenon. Now, it is a part of all segments of the society. There are social networking communities for people varying from eight-year-olds to doctors and lawyers, to the aged (Post, 2007).

FacebookTwo students of Harvard class founded Facebook (www.facebook.com) in February 2004. Membership was initially open to Harvard students only. Later, it opened to various universities with education accounts. By mid-2005, Facebook opened doors to highschool students. However, invites were required from existing users of Facebook, for new users to join the network (Boyd, 2007). As a result, students tend to invite friends in the same age group. This ensured that the users of Facebook were primarily college students. Facebook became the `cool' thing that college students did. Now, it includes networks for different geographic regions and various schools, colleges and organizations around the world. As of November 2007, the membership count in Facebook exceeded 57 million users. Around 85% of the college students

The users of Facebook are primarily college students. Hence, the features provided in Facebook intend to provide more fun and entertainment. These features include giving gifts (small icons of novelty items) to friends, listing of events in case of social gatherings, status updates, the `poke' feature to interact with friends, and sharing photos and videos. Every activity of the user is listed in a news feed, which is visible to all visitors of the profile. Facebook Marketplace allows users to post free classified ads in categories such as sale, housing, jobs and others. The marketplace is open for all users and is free for use.

TechnologyThe Facebook Platform was developed to provide a standards-based web service to access and contribute data to Facebook. This meant opening the system to third parties to add to the existing capabilities of Facebook. The platform enables Facebook to bring information in, rather than `push' information out. Users need not depend on a larger set of different sites for their information. The platform enables Facebook to become the homepage, ...