Abstract:
In view of the growing diversity of stakeholders that emerging, tourism businesses are envisaged to
engage with in their businesses, small, micro and medium enterprises’ sub-optimal utilisation of social
media technology (SMT) for branding and marketing of their products and services is ironic and
problematic. Perhaps the persistent inability of such businesses to augment their customer base stems
from their dependence on traditional technologies such as television and newspapers for marketing
their activities. However, these traditional technologies do not actively increase the visibility of brands
to customers and to broader markets the same way SMTs would. To close this gap, this paper examines
tourism SMMEs’ extent of use of SMTs to position and market brands. A quantitative approach and
survey was conducted on 234 tourism SMMEs’ owner/managers in the Free State province of South
Africa to establish the influence of SMTs on the branding and marketing of their products and services.
Only 123 questionnaires were correctly completed, representing a response rate of 53%. The papers’
findings revealed that tourism SMMEs in the Free State province utilise social media technologies to
position and market their brands and services. It further demonstrated that SMTs are important for
branding tourism SMMEs’ products/services as customers and prospective customers often engage
with the business via these platforms. The study recommends tourism SMMEs to develop an inventory
of customers and potential customers’ preferred social media platforms to ensure the optimisation of
SMT-based branding and marketing.
