"Let us listen to the good practices."

Social media plays a large role in both our personal and professional lives because not only does everyone utilizes it but it's also a growing method to engage and build relationships with customers, friends, families, and so on. In the case of the video, the study on social media was performed on 14 locations in Europe. Of all the locations, studies show that all except one location participated with social media. A couple of the motivations for engaging in SoM were direct contact, information, modern image, interaction, new channel, feedback, and so on. The statistics show that the direct contact was the highest reason for taking a part in SoM. Because there are more than 800 million active Facebook users, Facebook landed as first in list for the most visited platforms. Following Facebook are Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, etc. The study then continued to analyze how many hours were spent per week in workload; the highest resulted in 40hours and the lowest 0.5. When questioned if the SoM performance satisfied each destination, half responded somehow due to conducting experiments.

Thus, leading to the strategies of SoM; 5 destinations were for experimental strategies, 7 for follow defined strategies while 2 were in line with overall strategies. From the gathered facts, study concluded that there were three experimental levels of SoM expertise for the destinations. Level one was simply learning by doing without much effort, and contributing or investing up to 2hours each week. While level one only relied on sort of a trial-and-error system, level two invests up to 10 hours per week and had a predefined strategies to cover specific targets niche markets. Lastly, level three holds everything in line with overall strategies, covers niche markets, and create buzz building campaign for the target markets.

Moving on with the success factors, the popular responses were likes on Facebook, Twitter followers, then with fewer responses in traffic, interaction, recommendation, PR value, etc. The study continues to analyze the success factors and how to find out which factors work. One method was to observe user behavior matters, in other words, listen and learn. By using different tools, destinations could track websites and find out if they've achieved their set goals. However, not everyone is same and it's more than just tracking the websites or checking bounce rates or utilizing traffic sources. Another factor is that there are more than one websites for a specific destination. One method for creating a better destination website is by listening to the voice of the customers, asking questions such as why they're on the website, was the visit successful, why wasn't it successful, and lastly whether they had a good experience or not. The usage of Facebook plays as an example and discusses many aspects of managing success, social media strategies and expertise, success beyond control and much more. In terms of managing success, there is the information delivery opportunity, relation building opportunity, and channel dis-/reintermediation opportunity. Businesses establishes direct contact and take into account of spreading information about their company and its primary purposes. By using the fan-page site from Facebook platform, creating a blog, or Tweeting, they build a two-way relationship with customers where customers can contribute their thoughts and virtually interact and participate while maintaining a direct contact.