Аннотация
The article is devoted to a phenomenon of social media to which publicand scientific interest sharply increased in recent years. Disclosed arethe most common grounds for applying social media for scientific purposesand are considered some of the points of contact between socialmedia and science in general. In addition, this article refers to the main approachesto the study of the role of social media in tourism.Similar studiesin the near future may become one of the main vectors of the developmentof science in the field of tourism. However, general significance theoreticalapproaches to this direction of scientific research are not yet available. Thepaper attempts to clarify the issues related to the terminological apparatus,identify the main approaches to the definition of the role of social mediain tourism, to identify the main trends of development of this sphere publicactivity. Through analysisof different theoretical principles and concepts,in particular in the field of tourism, the study seeks to reveal: how did thetheoretical understanding of this phenomenon in foreign and domestic science,what were the predictions for the different stages and what is theirstatus at this stage.