eTourism Monitor Facts and Figures
on Swiss eTourism

National Tourism Organisations (NTO) on Facebook - International Benchmark 2013

Early May 2013, Switzerland Tourism has reached the landmark of 500’000 fans on their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/MySwitzerland). In order to compare the performance of Switzerland’s national tourism organization on an international level, we have collected data via the Fanpage Karma tool for a sample of 48 major tourism destinations on all continents, but with a specific focus on Europe. First, we checked to see if the NTO has a Facebook presence represented on their homepage (if there was no link we searched directly on Facebook). We looked also at the different language versions of the NTO website in order to control if the NTO is managing different Facebook pages in different languages. 17 out of 48 NTO had Facebook pages in more than one language. Poland with 15 and Ireland with 13 different pages are the countries with the most languages. The data of these various sites and sub-sites (147 Facebook pages) have been aggregated on a country level.

Results: Australia top NTO, Switzerland on rank 10

Tourism Australia hosts the world’s most popular destination social media sites, with over 4.6 million fans on Facebook, dominating the followers UK (1.1 Mio), Mexico (0.885 Mio), Croatia (0.815 Mio) and New Zealand (0.815 Mio) clearly in terms of community size. Switzerland is on a good tenth position with 0.5 Million fans. Tourism Australia’s remarkable growth demonstrates successful social media strategy. Research commissioned by Tourism Australia found “that social media is rapidly affecting the way Australians travel domestically, with a significant number of the 10 million Australians on Facebook making travel decisions based on their friends’ social media activity”.

The detailed results for the 48 countries can be viewed on an interactive dashboard.

Link to full-size image

p.s. 

See also the social media dashboards of over 150 international mountain resorts (Facebook and Twitter) and an analysis of these data sets on the blog of the Observatoire Valaisan du Tourisme.