Destination Promotional Videos On Youtube: Assessing Audience Engagement

Abstract

YouTube as a social media platform is used by both tourism practitioners and tourists for promoting or obtaining information about tourist destinations, thus it is paramount to use a method to assess such videos communication effectiveness. For such purpose, the study proposes a methodological approach to assess the positive and negative audience engagement of destination promotional videos (DPVs) posted on YouTube. To measure positive and negative audience engagement, four destination promotional videos about Budapest (Hungary) were selected. Previous models to measure engagement in social media were adapted and merged to suit YouTube. YouTube publicly available metrics (views, votes -likes/dislikes-, comments, and channel subscribers) were operationalised based on three dimensions: popularity, commitment and virality. Findings reveal that consumer-generated videos (CGVs) about Budapest produce a higher positive engagement than marketer-generated videos (MGVs). This study offers a methodological tool that can be easily employed by tourism practitioners and Destination Marketing Organisations (DMOs) to evaluate the marketing success of videos shared on YouTube. Moreover, this method may help practitioners from different fields to develop a clear strategy, optimize resources, reduce risk, evaluate competitors, and measure the impact of the content shared on YouTube.