A Systematic Literature Review on Social Media Analytics and Smart Tourism

Abstract

In recent years, the number of papers on how tourist use social media is increasing and is still being discussed. The main aim of this study is analyze the state of art by identifying the most important issues related to Social Media Analytics and Smart Tourism (SMAST) and offer some guidelines for future research through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). The methodology used is based on collect, synthetize and analyze works published between 2014 and April 2018. This work is based on 45 papers obtained from three electronic databases, the result of this paper obtained twenty issues based on SMAST classified in four categories: (i) methodology of research, (ii) type of analysis, (iii) tourism current issues and (iv) social media type or platform. Furthermore, the top three of most popular issues obtained consist in: (1) works based in literature review, theoretical approach or explorative analysis; (2) Travel information, search or electronic word of mouth (eWOM), user-generated content (UGC) and (3) Social media activity analytics. The conclusion of this work emphasizes that the use of data generated by users in social networks and Smart Tourism are topics of great interest for researchers in tourism; challenges, opportunities and emerging approaches in SMAST are also presented.