ARE ROMANIAN TRAVEL AGENCIES CONCERNED ABOUT THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE?

: The tourism industry has experienced notable changes because of the widespread adoption of social media. As a result, travel companies have been compelled to give greater importance to their online presence and proactively interact with customers via social media channels. This study aimed to assess the concern of Romanian travel agencies for their presence on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok through an analysis of social media metrics. According to the research findings, even though travel agencies exhibit a preference for Facebook when promoting tourism-related products and services, the other two analysed platforms yield greater user engagement. The study has implications for both management and marketing activities within the tourism field.


Introduction
Social media platforms provide an unprecedented opportunity for companies to communicate with their target audience. Globally there are over 200 million business accounts on Instagram (Instagram, 2023) that users visit every day, and over 200 million businesses using Facebook apps and tools (Bagadiya, 2023). Moreover, with over 4.76 billion users (Kemp, 2023a) connecting daily on social media platforms, it makes them an ideal channel of communication between companies and customers. In Romania, at the beginning of 2023, there were 13.5 million users of social media platforms, representing 67.3% of the total population, which demonstrates the need for companies to be present on these platforms as well (Kemp, 2023b).
The rise of social media has revolutionized the process of seeking, discovering, acquiring, exchanging, shaping, and absorbing information (Sigala, 2011). The popularity of this phenomenon has also led to changes in the tourism industry (Hudson and Thal, 2013;Živković et al., 2014). This has forced travel companies to prioritise their online visibility and actively engage with clients on social media platforms. In this way, they can interact directly with customers, closely monitor their opinions and ratings on tourism products and services and go further in meeting their needs and preferences (Hvass and Munar, 2012).
In this context, the following questions arose in the authors' minds about some of the main stakeholders in this sector, namely travel agencies. Q1: "Are Romanian travel agencies concerned about their social media presence?" Q2: "Which are the social media platforms preferred by the Romanian travel agencies?" Q3: "Are travel agencies in Romania interested in increasing their visibility on social media platforms?" As the study was designed to be exploratory in nature, the authors did not formulate any hypotheses beforehand. The focus of this research was based on finding answers to the above questions.
Therefore, this research sought: (1) to evaluate the presence of Romanian travel agencies on the most popular social media platforms in the country, (2) to evaluate the activity of Romanian travel agencies on the social media platforms where they are present, (3) to identify those social media platforms where Romanian travel agencies receive the most engagement from their audience and (4) to determine the interest of Romanian travel agencies to increase their visibility on social media platforms.

Methodology
To achieve the objectives the authors conducted a social media analysis. The Facebook, Instagram and TikTok pages of 10 travel agencies from Romania were analysed. The choice of the three platforms was based on statistics provided by DataReportal (Kemp, 2023b) on the preferences and most frequently used social media platforms by Romanians.
In order to achieve the objectives, social media indicators such as the number of followers or fans, the number of posts, the number of reactions, comments and shares, the total number of people who viewed the content on all three mentioned platforms during the period 1 January 2022 -31 January 2022 were examined. For objective four containing the benchmarking analysis, the social media indicators mentioned above were also examined during the period 1 January 2021 -31 December 2021.
The complete data of the social media indicators involved in this research can be found in Appendix 1. This analysis was made possible thanks to the Socialinsider platform, which serves as a social media analysis, reporting and comparison tool (Socialinsider, 2023), where the authors had access for a period of two months between November 15, 2022 and January 15, 2023.
In addition, to achieve objective three, the authors calculated the averages engagement rate per post based on the number fans/followers and by reach, on all three platforms during the analysed period. The formulas used to calculate those indicators for each platform can be found in Table 1. In order to select the 10 most relevant travel agencies in Romania, the authors have monitored for two months, from 1 November 2022 to 31 December 2022, the results returned by the Google search engine on the first page, when typing the words "travel agencies Romania". The list of travel agencies whose websites were on the first page of Google during the above-mentioned period is presented in Table 2.
To strengthen their relevance for the research, the authors sought, with the help of the unique registration code publicly displayed on the agencies' websites, to find out their age on the Romanian market, at the time of writing.

O1. Evaluation of the presence of Romanian travel agencies on the most popular social media platforms in the country
According to the authors' manual search of the travel agencies in the sample, all of them are present on Facebook and Instagram platforms, but only eight out of the 10 are present on the TikTok platform. However, comparing the number of fans and followers on the three platforms (Table 3), the differences are extremely significant. For a better overview, Fig. 1 illustrates these differences.
On TikTok platform, except for Christian Tour which has a relatively large number of followers, the other travel agencies have an insignificant number of users who like their page. The number of followers on Instagram is not very high either. All travel agencies analysed have a higher number of fans on the Facebook platform.  Further analysis of the number of posts made by travel agencies on each platform shows that agencies are more interested in the Facebook platform than the other two ( Table 4). Six of the travel agencies that have an account on TikTok posted an average of 5 posts during the period analysed. The travel agencies analysed made, on average, between 0.26 and 4.3 posts/day on Facebook, between 0.003 and 4.09 posts/day on Instagram and between 0.005 and 1.04 posts/day on TikTok.

O3. Identify the social media platforms where Romanian travel agencies receive the most engagement from their audience
Analysing the data in Table 5, it can be seen that the average engagement rate per post by fans and reach varied between travel agencies over the period analysed. The average engagement rate per post, based on fans, with the highest value on the Facebook platform was held by the agency Perfect Tour, and on Instagram by Eximtur.
Regarding the average engagement rate per post, by reach, the highest value recorded during the period under review was recorded on both Facebook and Instagram by the travel agency Eximtur, and on the TikTok platform by the travel agency Dertour. In terms of the ranking of platforms with the highest average engagement by fans, Instagram is the winner in eight out of the 10 cases. Only two of the 10 agency profiles included in the sample have a higher fan engagement rate on Facebook than on Instagram. As for the comparison between the three platforms regarding the average engagement rate per post by reach, the situation is as follows: the highest values were recorded by the TikTok platform (six of the eight who have an account), followed by Instagram and lastly Facebook.

O4. Determining the interest of Romanian travel agencies to increase their visibility on social media platforms.
To analyse the travel agencies' interest in increasing their visibility on the most used social media platforms where they are present, the authors considered the number of posts made by them in 2022 compared to 2021 (Table 6).
Regarding the activity on the Facebook platform, eight out of 10 agencies analysed posted less in 2022 compared to 2021, while regarding the activity on Instagram, more than half of the travel agencies analysed posted more in 2022 compared to the previous year.
It can be observed also that the average engagement is not necessarily correlated with the increase or decrease on the number of posts made.

Discussion and Conclusion
Because of the exploratory nature of the analysis conducted, this research does not pretend to extrapolate the results to the macro level, however considering that the sample included those travel agencies that appear on the first page of Google and their longevity, we can consider them relevant to the Romanian tourism market.
The travel agencies examined are concerned and aware of the importance of their social media presence. Although they focus on Facebook as the platform on which all the travel agencies in the sample post the most content, the results regarding the impact of the other two platforms, Instagram and TikTok, are interesting. Thus, the findings of this study offer practical implications for tourism business managers and marketers in the tourism industry, as we will discuss below.
Based on the research we could see that that the average engagement rate per post by reach was, in most cases, higher on TikTok than on the other two platforms, and this is most likely due to the way the algorithm works on the platform. This information can be valuable for travel agency managers and travel marketers in Romania to consider when developing their social media strategies. However, it is also important to note that creating content exclusively in video format can be more challenging and requires a different set of skills and resources compared to other platforms. Therefore, it is essential to carefully assess the feasibility and effectiveness of using TikTok as part of their overall social media strategy.
One other interesting aspect of the research, with implications for managers and marketers in the travel industry, is that it is not only the increase in the number of posts that leads to higher engagement, but other factors can also affect engagement levels, such as the quality of content or changes in the platform algorithm. Thus, simply increasing or decreasing the number of posts does not always have a direct impact on engagement.
In conclusion, social media marketing is a useful tool for travel agencies, and in the digital age, their presence on these social networks is essential, even if this comes with various challenges.