STUDYING TOURISM WEBSITES AND THE EFFECTS OF ONLINE SOCIAL MEDIA

During the past decade, information technology has significantly changed the way the 
tourism companies plans, controls and manages operations. For example, the increased 
use of Web 2.0, has gradually altering the industry structure and developing a whole 
range of opportunities and threats. Hence, the purpose of this study is to verify the impact 
of online social networks in raising the number of visitors to referenced websites as well 
as forecasting the total number of tourism websites visitors and social media referrals to 
better understand and evaluate the potential importance of this technology using time 
series analysis. This objective will be achieved through analyzing the pattern of visits to a 
sample of Egyptian tourism websites and the relationship between the total visits and 
those having the OSNs as referrals has been measured.
The data analyzed in this study were provided from the secondary data generated by 
Google Analytics (GA). The data collected consisted of the series of total visits of 
Egyptian websites and the contributions of these visits via social media referrals. The 
significance of the explanatory variable visits via social media referrals as well as the 
time period was addressed with a multiple regression. To forecast the total number of 
visits to the tourism websites the time series analysis approach as a non causal method 
has been used.
The results show that time and social media referrals have a significant influence on 
the total visits of tourism websites. Moreover, Egyptian tourism businesses should not 
only consider the presence and interaction on Facebook, Google+ and My space, they 
should also consider Media sharing platforms such as You Tube and Pinterest.