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YouTube usage by Spanish tourist destinations as a tool to communicate their identities and brands

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Abstract

Videos are influential image creators and video-sharing sites like YouTube offer new opportunities to DMOs to communicate the identity and the brand of the destinations they represent. The aim of this article was to gain an insight into how Spanish DMOs use YouTube to communicate their promotional videos and to study whether these videos communicate brands through two main elements: attraction factors and emotional values. The research methodology combined an analysis of two important communicative variables of the official YouTube channels (interactivity and visibility) of the analysed destinations with a content analysis of the last 25 videos uploaded to those channels by the DMOs. On the one hand, results showed that the usage of YouTube by Spanish tourist destinations was widespread but with some limitations. The contents of the videos were mainly informative, and this helped to communicate attraction factors rather than emotional values. On the other hand, the presence of brand values is usually related to good results in terms of visibility and interactivity. The article contributes to good practices and recommendations to communicate territories’ brands via YouTube.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Spain’s Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Grant id.: CSO2012-34824 “Uso e influencia de los social media y la comunicación 2.0 en la toma de decisiones turísticas y en la imagen de marca de los destinos”).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain

    Assumpció Huertas & Natàlia Lozano-Monterrubio

  2. Faculty of Social Sciences and Communication, University of Vigo, Campus A Xunqueira s/n, 36005, Pontevedra, Spain

    María Isabel Míguez-González

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  1. Assumpció Huertas
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  2. María Isabel Míguez-González
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  3. Natàlia Lozano-Monterrubio
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Correspondence to María Isabel Míguez-González.

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Huertas, A., Míguez-González, M.I. & Lozano-Monterrubio, N. YouTube usage by Spanish tourist destinations as a tool to communicate their identities and brands. J Brand Manag 24, 211–229 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41262-017-0031-y

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