Understanding the creation of destination images through a festival’s Twitter conversation

The purpose of this paper is to explore the analysis of the potential contribution of festivals in generating a destination image through social media (particularly Twitter).

This study follows a multi-method approach by recollecting, analyzing and mixing quantitative and qualitative techniques. The authors focus on the case of Vic (Spain), analyzing the destination’s image as projected by different users (administration, private sector, particular users, residents) on Twitter in relation to an international musical festival, El Mercat de Música Viva de Vic (the Vic Live Music Market).

From a theoretical perspective, the study’s results advocate a reconsideration of the role of social media in the processes of creating a destination’s image. It is important to take into account the need to perform a specific analysis for each platform and consider how it operates and which stakeholders prevail by weight, by the clusters they pertain to and by their elicited descriptions. In the particular case of Twitter, the image-formation continuum generated by different actors through different sources is present here on one single platform.

This study is limited in terms of being based on only one social media site, and it would be very interesting to complement it by analyzing other relevant social media platforms.

From a practical point of view, this presents a challenge to destination managers to learn how to work on each specific platform in order to oversee the different destination visions and their resources.

From the results, the authors affirm that destination-branding analyses now need a platform-specific approach as well as an in-depth stakeholder analysis, since it is no longer possible to separate producers and consumers in brand image creation. Branding is becoming a more inclusive and collaborative process.