Do Social Media Investments Pay Off? Preliminary evidence from Swiss destination marketing organizations

ocial 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

The return on tourism organizations' social media investments ::preliminary evidence from Belgium, France and Switzerland

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