Abstract
Literature suggests dozens of ways of how to quantify the success of social media. However, there is no consent about the measurement of the return of investment (ROI). Only very limited empirical work is looking at the topic especially in tourism. This study is one of the first attempts to look at the ROI of tourism organizations. In doing so, various input (i.e. budget, manpower, amount of platforms used) and outcome (i.e. posts, website success and social media KPIs such as number of posts, interaction, and page performance index) variables are analysed. Responses of 150 tourism organizations to an online questionnaire and social media data collected via the monitoring tool Fanpage Karma provide insights for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest. Our data indicates that despite an ever increasing importance of online services for the customer journey, the monetary and manpower resources allocated to online marketing and social media is modest for most tourism organizations of the three surveyed countries. The achieved outcomes of the tourism organizations are weak especially when it comes to engagement figures. Revealed relationships such as between marketing budget and success measures for YouTube videos are presented and a discussion is provided.
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Notes
The expression DMO will be used for both types of organizations throughout the paper.
The rank “is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and page views over the past month” (Alexa 2016).
Channel views, a YouTube KPI provided by Fanpage Karma, are defined as “the number of times the channel has been viewed” (http://www.fanpagekarma.com/help).
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to the anonymous reviewers of the ENTER2016 conference and JITT for their valuable and constructive feedback on previous versions of this paper and to JITT for giving us the opportunity to submit an extended version of our conference paper. Thanks for the valuable feedback of the ENTER2016 attendees during the presentation at the conference in Bilbao.
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This paper is an extended and updated version of a conference paper titled ‘Do Social Media Investments Pay Off? Preliminary Evidence from Swiss Destination Marketing Organizations’ previously published in the proceedings of Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016 Conference (ENTER 2016) held in Bilbao, Spain, February 2– 5, 2016.
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Wozniak, T., Stangl, B., Schegg, R. et al. The return on tourism organizations’ social media investments: preliminary evidence from Belgium, France, and Switzerland. Inf Technol Tourism 17, 75–100 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-017-0077-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-017-0077-4