Media content in social networks as a tool of domestic tourism development and promotion in the region

The article is aimed at studying the opportunities of social networks for the development of tourist and recreational activities in the region. The author considers the main approaches to the use of social network media in marketing. Increasing importance of Internet resources in daily life causes the relevance of the work. The author shows the possibilities and innovative role of social media in the tourism and recreation sphere and describe the main types of users in social networks. The article discusses the nature of the relationships among participants in social networks and their properties. The author emphasizes the most popular web-platforms in Russia with a description of the specifics of working in them. SWOT analysis, conducted by the author, made it possible to identify the weaknesses and strengths of using social networks in the tourism business. Through the example of the project «local_touristic» in Instagram, the article considers the possibilities of local tourist brands promotion and interaction with the target audience. The media content of the account is informative, visual, and has a single design style, which is a competitive advantage. The article presents the authorial method of calculating user loyalty to the content based on such Instagram empirical indicators as likes, comments, and saves. Correction factors provide the correctness of calculations. Using the analysis of the project’s media content the author identifies the most attractive objects for users of the social network. The author also determines the most popular among the population attractive objects of the Central Black Soil Region for domestic tourism. The results obtained can be used by municipal tourism departments and by tourism business for the domestic tourism development in the Central Black Soil Zone of Russia.