Role of social media in promoting education tourism

Abstract

Tourism is an important source of revenue for any country and media plays an important role to promote tourism in different ways, like information search, decision-making behaviors and in focusing on best practices for interacting with consumers. Educational tourism is one of the fastest growing areas of the travel and tourism and is frequently unnoticed by tourism professionals and marketers. In past educational institutes were rely on traditional information sources like print media, broadcast media, education fairs and university websites to promote their universities and students also took help from these sources to select their courses and university. The advent of social media brings a drastic change in marketing strategies. This study reviews the existing literature to find out the impact of social media to promote education tourism. Social media is computer-mediated technologies that allow individuals, companies, NGOs, governments, and other organizations to view, create and share information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks. Literature reveals that social media plays an important role to promote educational tourism which ultimately improves and promotes the economic, social, political and cultural life of the nation. By hosting international students it will increase tourism related projects and will raise investment and using this investment in infrastructure and for the improvement of quality of education and research work. In recent years with the rising importance of social media, many higher educational institutions are using social media tools for the promotion purposes. This paper suggests that the higher education institutes, education ministry and tourism department should aggressively use social media to promote education tourism for economic development of the country.