Summary: Follow The Leaders

Since the introduction of Twitter in 2006, scholars have been attempting to understand its applications to the business world and ways it can improve marketing. Though it is obvious that the microblogging application has the ability to affect the way businesses market themselves, there is confusion about what is the best method to implement it in a business’s marketing strategy. Due to this confusion, there are countless studies done on the website and its applications to the different industries. It can be difficult to determine which research articles are the most successful at determining what for Twitter to be implemented into a business’s marketing strategy. In this exposition, it will be proven that due to having the most relevant

How Twitter is transforming destination marketing”, the author examines the marketing applications of the microblogging website Twitter. It is claimed that, “Twitter is an ideal way for places to build a brand image” (“Follow the Leaders” 27) as it is both cost effective and it allows for the interaction between users. To do this, the author tries to prove that Twitter removes the barriers to communication, as all that is required to communicate is an internet connection. The author also argues that Twitter increases the ease at which customers can tell others about their experiences at a given location, increasing the value of word of mouth advertising. Moreover, the author argues that, due to the nature of the website, interaction between tourists and those that represent the areas in which they may wish to visit. They support the claim with general statistics on Twitter; such as the amount of users and their locations, providing the reader with insight into the reach that Twitter truly possesses. It should be noted that instead of conducting research to support their claims, the author simply takes the findings of Efe Steven, and applies them to the tourism industry – all while giving no real overview of the research that Steven conducted. Due to this, one can easily consider the article very weak, as without explicit knowledge of the works of Efe Steven, it is difficult to verify the legitimacy of the statistics used to

Alturki and A. Fayyiymi investigate the impact that computer generated tweets have on potential customers. In the article the researchers claim that the “internet gives incredible opportunities for companies to learn about their consumers and provides different channels for marketing” (Alturki et al 26). The author aims to support this by measuring the level of effectiveness Twitter has for providing an organization with information about their customers and informing the consumer about available products. They do this by creating software that automatically posted tweets on a company’s Twitter account as well as provided responses to questions asked by consumers on Twitter. They then analyzed the number of website visits and transactions that these tweets caused. They ultimately determined that though Twitter was good for generating knowledge about a company, it did not generate a high number of transactions. Through the data collected did not necessarily support the claim, Alturki and Fayyiymi did state “The number of visits from Twitter before using the marketing tool was about 550 visits and the tool caused the increase of about 49% getting 822 visits in total” (Alturki et al 28) meaning that Twitter nearly doubled their companies visibility. The strength of this article, like several of the others, is that the authors used empirical data that they generated to come