Social Media Tools and (E)Destination: An Italian Case Study

Social networks have a significant role in the tourism sector: both on the demand and on the supply. They are an important information source for travelers, allowing destination makers to ‘socialize’ and share information and comments with users and possible visitors. Leveraging off social media to market destinations has proven to be an excellent strategy as largely recognized in several studies focused on the comprehension of importance of social media in the online tourism market (Chung and Buhalis, 2008; Inversini and Buhalis 2009; Xiang and Gretzel 2010). Following these developments, tourism managers have started to put in practice new strategies that exploit social media tools in order to promote and incentive tourism in the area. Therefore, the primary purpose of the study is to show how digital strategies and, especially, the use of social media tools, may be critical to enable tourism destination competitiveness. The main objective is to analyse a destination digital strategy aimed to define the best features to perform a winning digital strategy that allows to promote and market a tourist destination on the web. Framed in the above premises, a benchmark of some Italian e-destinations best practice examples [ENIT 2015 Blogmeter 2015 have been conducted with the aim to comprehend trends and main features of the use of technologies and applications. The chosen cases are, then, analysed more in depth, through a qualitative online exploratory survey. The results obtained from a contemporary and successful Italian DMO, evidence the criteria enabling a competive 2.0 tourism strategy.