Use of Twitter by National Tourism Organizations of European Countries

In the last few decades, National tourism organizations (NTOs) emerged into the critical institutions for the countries branding and identification worldwide. The increased relevance of the NTOs in the development of tourism of specific countries also increased their focus to Web 2.0. technologies and their social media prominence. The primary objective of this study purpose is to investigate the utilization of the social media profiles of the NTOs of European countries. In order to get comprehensive and systematized results, authors brought up three research questions: (i) what is the activity of NTOs according to social media utilization, (ii) what is the level of coherence among countries according to time of establishment and language of Twitter accounts of NTOs in European countries and (iii) is there relationship among Twitter activity of NTOs and country tourism activity? The study investigates the usage of social media by reviewing the official profiles of NTOs in the main social media channels, and subsequently extracted data from their Twitter accounts in order to establish the possible correlations among the NTOs' Twitter activities and countries' characteristics. Statistic software the Statistica is used as a tool to examine output data analytics. Distinctive knowledge emerged from the investigation, noteworthy both for scholars and adaptable for business. Research established that European countries NTOs have recognized the importance of social media and that most of NTOs actively use the combination of various social media in order to achieve their strategic goals. Relationships among activity on social media and tourism results have been confirmed. We provide examples of the best practices which can serve as a helpful strategy development models for the NTOs' practitioners. Finally, we outline the possible directions for further research in the area of social media utilization of NTOs.