MICRO, SMALL AND MEDIUM ENTERPRISES AND SOCIAL NETWORKS IN TOURISM INDUSTRY IN MANZANILLO, COLIMA, MEXICO.

Nowadays, the use of social media has become an important tool to introduce new products and services in the world. However, in some countries social networks are very important to show what the company is and what they are doing with their businesses, it means that they sharing everything with their customers, like products, services, goals, some cases they try to educate their public about the use of the product or service, among other things. When people started using social networks on the internet, these were conceived as a mean to communicate with relatives or friends. However, with time, the social networks have evolved to a point that they now allow people to use them to generate sales and increase the competitiveness of enterprises. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the lack of training and knowledge about the use of social networks by local businesses and the barriers they face when they decide to use them as sales platforms, and to demonstrate the impact it could have on their businesses. Four SMEs located in Colima State in Mexico were studied, selected to be sufficiently successful and representative in terms of industry and size, for theoretical generalization purposes. These tourism SMEs stem from various sectors, such as: travel agencies, tour operator, hotel and restaurant. Data were collected through semi-structured tape-recorded interviews, ranging approximately one hour and a half each, with the owner-manager or the manager responsible for social media. Interview transcripts were then coded and analyzed following Miles and Huberman’s (1994) prescriptions with the assistance of the Atlas.ti application. The results allow us to conclude that the investigated companies believe that the use of social networks is extremely important to be able to compete in the market. However, due to a lack of training, they were not able to implement properly the utilization of social networks in their companies.