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Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016 pp 267–280Cite as

Do Social Media Investments Pay Off?: Preliminary Evidence from Swiss Destination Marketing Organizations

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Abstract

Social media has become a dominant subject in tourism and hospitality research. Given the importance of social media in the customer journey, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) need to understand the effectiveness of their social media activities. This paper analyses the relationship between DMOs’ marketing spending and staffing and various social media key performance indicators (KPIs). We used an online questionnaire to collect data about social media activities and respective marketing budgets of DMOs in Switzerland for the reference year 2014. We also gathered social media KPI figures of the five main social media platforms used by these DMOs (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and Instagram). Our results suggest that DMOs’ investments in social media (allocated resources for marketing, online marketing, and especially social media) correlate with identified metrics for measuring social media success.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Tourism, Lucerne School of Business, Lucerne, Switzerland

    Thomas Wozniak & Andreas Liebrich

  2. Faculty of Business, Economics and Law, University of Surrey, Surrey, UK

    Brigitte Stangl

  3. Institute of Tourism, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO) Valais, Delémont, Switzerland

    Roland Schegg

Authors
  1. Thomas Wozniak
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  2. Brigitte Stangl
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  3. Roland Schegg
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  4. Andreas Liebrich
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas Wozniak .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Tourism, Bournemouth University, Poole, Dorset, United Kingdom

    Alessandro Inversini

  2. HES-SO Valais, Sierre, Valais, Switzerland

    Roland Schegg

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Wozniak, T., Stangl, B., Schegg, R., Liebrich, A. (2016). Do Social Media Investments Pay Off?: Preliminary Evidence from Swiss Destination Marketing Organizations. In: Inversini, A., Schegg, R. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2016. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28231-2_20

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