1. Use of Social Media by National
Tourism Organizations (NTOs)
Mridula Dwivedi
GD Goenka World Institute
Gurgaon, India
mridula@gmail.com

2. Motivation for the Work
• Initial motivation from getting a follow from an
NTO on Twitter
• Academic Review Process/Attitude to Social
Media
• Lack of Data about NTOs
• Lack of Academic Literature on Social Media

3. Research Questions
• What is the extent of the use of social media
by the NTOs?
• Which social media platforms are used by the
NTOs?
• Which social media platforms are used more
frequently?

4. Methodology
• Largely Searched for Information on the Net
• How Many Countries in the World?
• We merged UNWTO and the UN list to arrive at 198
countries.
• In the end we refined the list to 195 countries.
• Then we located NTO/Embassy websites for 195
countries.

5. Findings
• 80 out of 195 (41%) NTOs are already using at
least on social media platform.
• As there was no data available, we had
anticipated it to be a more niche activity.

6. Findings- List of Platforms Used
• Be Local • Plurk
• Blogs • Scribd
• Facebook • Tripadvisor (Links to
• Flickr their Country)
• Forums • Tumblr
• Koprol • Twitter
• Myspace • Youtube
• Orkut • WAYN
• Plaxo

7. The Top Platforms
• Facebook- 63
• Twitter- 49
• Youtube- 49
• Flickr- 19
• 16 countries used all 4

8. Chart 1: Use of Social Media Platform by NTOs
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
Facebook Twitter Youtube Flickr Blogs Myspace Tripadvisor Forum

9. Conclusions
• Finding out correct NTO Websites was a task
in itself.
• Social media information could be buried
somewhere on the website.
• Social media sites could be available to only
some countries.

10. Conclusions
• Using Original Logos
• Not a niche activity anymore?
• Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and Flickr emerged
as the most popular platforms.

11. Conclusions
• Presence may not translate into use.
• Parameters for use- Promotion? Interaction?
Feedback? Business? Others?
• Contests?

12. Thank You
• Questions?
• More Ways to Connect
– http://blogs.gonomad.com/traveltalesfromindia/
– Twitter @mridulad
– https://www.facebook.com/traveltalesfromindia