A Systematic Literature Review on Social Media Acceptance and Adoption by the SMEs in Tourism Industry

Abstract

The emergence of social media has led to a change in how entrepreneurs execute their routine operations. Studies on social media and entrepreneurship are extremely new and dispersed in their focus, however there is growing interest from academia and practitioners in this space for greater research and analysis. This paper does a thorough overview of studies in the field of social media and SMEs in Tourism. To discover important theories used in the domain, a total of 75 papers published between 2010 and 2020 were synthesized based on the setup inclusive and exclusive criteria and those have been screened through a scientific refinement procedure (PRISMA model) into 20 potential articles for this study. The scope of study, an integrated framework was constructed to investigate the antecedents of social media acceptance by tourism lodging sector SMEs in Sri Lanka. The majority of papers glanced into the factors that influence social media adoption by entrepreneurs had gone beyond the marketing drive. In the tourism industry, Social media, playing a considerable portion of the field of internet tourism , plays a significant role in search engine travel planning, social media incorporates a range of websites allowing customers, ranging from publishing stories, opinions, and photos and movie clips, to share their experiences. But in most of the studies, social media acceptance and adoption are common axioms that have been used by the researchers with some conspiracy in theory conceptualization. The literature analysis and framework contribute to a better understanding of social media acceptance behavior in tourism industry. This lays the groundwork for future study and imparting practice in the field of the Tourism lodging industry in Sri Lanka.