Social Media Data Analytics for Tourism - A Preliminary Study

Social media data are increasingly used as the source of research in a variety of domains. A typical example is urban analytics, which aims at solving urban problems by analyzing data from different sources including social media. The potential value of social media data in tourism studies, which is one of the key topics in urban research, however has been much less investigated. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between social media dynamics and the visiting patterns of visitors to touristic locations in real-world cases. By conducting a comparative study, we demonstrate how social media characterizes touristic locations differently from other data sources. Our study further shows that social media data can provide real-time insights of tourists’ visiting patterns in big events, thus contributing to the understanding of social media data utility in tourism studies.