Marketing of a Tourist Destination in Social Media

This work explores how Russian and foreign Destination Management Organizations employ social media to market and promote their destinations. The research is based on the data collected from all existing official pages of destinations included in the Tripadvisor’s rating of the best tourist destinations in Russia and the world in 2018. Data analysis has been conducted during the period of 1 year (from April 1, 2017 to April 1, 2018). In total, the information has been collected from 8 social networking websites, the collected amount of posts equals 27334. The findings indicate the most popular social networking websites employed by Russian and foreign Destination Management Organizations, social networking websites in which users are most active in relation to publications, identify leaders in the use of social networks by the number of posts, the number of subscribers, the involvement of subscribers in relation to the publication. The investigation of the nature of social media employment has been conducted by the example of the social network VKontakte for Russian tourist destinations and Facebook for foreign destinations. The obtained data has been summarized, which allowed to compare the level and nature of the activity of Russian and foreign Destination Management Organizations in social media. On this basis, a set of recommendations has been developed for improving the use of social networks as a destination marketing tool.