The use of social media in destination marketing: An exploratory study

Social media provides customers and businesses of modern times with an unprecedented growth in ways of commu-nication and interaction. Tourism organisations can benefit from the limitless opportunities offered by social media and ideally, evolve their relationship with their customers into a networked process of innovation. While there is a growing number of social media studies in the context of tourism, few researches have addressed the application of social media by tourism providers. Thus, this study employed an exploratory research design aimed at establishing a detailed understanding of current use of social media among National Tourism Organizations (NTOs) of the world’s 193 countries. To this end, data mining was used to identify the social media applications and types that are used by NTOs, and it was followed by content analysis, to investigate NTOs’ strategic use of social media. The findings of this study suggest that many NTOs are still not aware of potential and opportunities offered by social media and for those with social media presence, there is a great room for improvement in strategic use of social media. This study contributes to the existing body of literature by providing an understanding of use of social media in destination marketing. The study also offers some interesting insights for tourism marketers