The usage of social media by the destination management organizations. The case study of the Portuguese DMO

Abstract

Searching information on the Internet has taken a lead role in planning trips by tourists. Due to social interaction at several levels and in different scopes, the social media applications have emerged as very important applications for spreading tourist information. Accordingly, our aim is to evaluate the implementation and the use of social media applications by the Portuguese Destination Management Organizations (DMO). A questionnaire was applied to the selected DMO in order to know: which social media applications were the most popular, which return they get as a consequence of using this type of applications, and who manages the production and publishes the contents. The DMO were analyzed according to their territorial dimension, human resources, annual budget and social foot-print.