USE OF TWITTER BY NATIONAL TOURISM ORGANIZATIONS OF EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

In the last few decades, National tourism organizations (NTOs) emerged into the critical institutions for the countries branding and identification worldwide. The increased relevance of the NTOs in the development of tourism of specific countries also increased their focus to Web 2.0. technologies and their social media prominence. The primary objective of this study purpose is to investigate the utilization of the social media profiles of the NTOs of European countries. In order to get comprehensive and systematized results, authors brought up three research questions: (i) what is the activity of NTOs according to social media utilization, (ii) what is the level of coherence among countries according to time of establishment and language of Twitter accounts of NTOs in European countries and (iii) is there relationship among Twitter activity of NTOs and country tourism activity? The study investigates the usage of social media by reviewing the official profiles of NTOs in the main social media channels, and subsequently extracted data from their Twitter accounts in order to establish the possible correlations among the NTOs’ Twitter activities and countries’ characteristics. Statistic software the Statistica is used as a tool to examine output data analytics. Distinctive knowledge emerged from the investigation, noteworthy both for scholars and adaptable for business. Research established that European countries NTOs have recognized the importance of social media and that most of NTOs actively use the combination of various social media in order to achieve their strategic goals. Relationships among activity on social media and tourism results have been confirmed. We provide examples of the best practices which can serve as a helpful strategy development models for the NTOs’ practitioners. Finally, we outline the possible directions for further research in the area of social media utilization of NTOs.


INTRODUCTION
The relevance of social media in tourism is established and investigated by numerous authors worldwide.From its initial purpose as a tool for people to connect, social media shifted to an omnipresent technological concept that transformed overall business communication techniques [1].As a result of social media expansion, users transformed into the media themselves in order to exchange knowledge, information, and experiences, which support development possibilities for various industries [2].
For the tourism and hospitality sector, there are numerous advantages from social media utilization.The whole travel circle has affected by the influence of the social media: it begins from vacation planning, destination, and products promotion, and expanded to decision making during the trip and becoming analytic data machine afterward [3].
Development of the Web 2.0.technologies and expansion of the e-WOM by the social media has an immediate impact on tourist destination reputation and encompasses all travel stages: before, during and after visiting destination [4].
The focus of this article is to explore the social media activity of official National tourism organizations (NTOs) of the 28 European Union country members.This investigation is exploratory and interpretative in nature, as it aims to answer three research questions disclosed.The questions together will consequently unveil the patterns and methods of how EU countries utilize social media in order to promote their countries.The research questions are set as follows.
RQ1: What is the activity of NTOs according to social media utilization?RQ2: What is the level of coherence among countries according to the time of establishment and language of Twitter accounts of NTOs in European countries?
RQ3: Is there a relationship among Twitter activity of NTOs and country characteristics?
The article begins with the Introduction section which points out the relevance and objectives of the investigation.Next section is Theoretical background, which gives a brief literature overview on the topic.The Results section discloses different insights into countries and social media data.First, general tourist information as overnight arrivals and overall population about EU member countries were given.Furthermore, by content analysis of the web pages of the national tourism organizations (NTOs) of the countries, utilization of four most prominent social media was explored for each country.An extensive investigation is conducted on the Twitter data output, as the most distinguished microblog globally.Insights were extracted from the official Twitter accounts, and with the program software 'Statistica' the statistic analysis was performed.In the 'Discussion' section, answers on the three research questions were presented.Lastly, conclusion and the future research directions were pointed out.

BACKGROUND NATIONAL TOURISM ORGANIZATIONS
NTOs represent the key institutions for tourism development, branding, and marketing of the country [5].Numerous factors are included in establishing NTOs' strategies and forms, such as size and culture, political, economic and social aspects of the nation [6].
NTOs bring together various players from the tourism industry [7].They serve as the link for the private and public sector in terms of tourism and national promotion activities as they provide a connection among business suppliers and tourist services performance companies [8].
Various authors [9] assert that national branding, and its importance is equally relevant as the reputation of the companies and brands.However, branding procedures and strategies are not established as they are in the private sector and the companies due to the recent attention and awareness of the potential benefits of the matter.
Therefore, strategic planning combined with other activities emerged as the primary function of the NTOs [10].Functions of NTO's are centered around systematic and long term promotion of the destination worldwide in order to achieve growth of the market share [11] and to establish 'a strong brand image with clearly identified and powerfully projected brand value,' [12].

OFFICIAL TOURISM MARKETING
NTOs' marketing tools and channels have excessively transformed since their first appearance at the beginning of the 20th century [13].Initially, NTO's operated on the local level and expanded with the package holiday appearance and presence of the holiday brochure letters [14].
Holiday brochure and posters represented the most important and innovative mass tourism marketing thenceforth [15],till the point where usage of visual means was introduced [116].
Images of destinations with the follow-up promotion with guides included designed by NTOs' and Town Council promotion department served as a prevalent marketing tool used by NTOs' continuously until the emergence of the Internet [17].
Internet and technology development had a substantial impact on the whole tourism sector, the way travelers gather and exchange information, and consequently, on NTOs' functions and operations [18].The principal challenge for NTO' s was adapting to technological change, and this was the time when the first NTOs' web pages appeared [19].
The rise of the Web 2.0.technologies and social media impact brought great prominence to developing marketing strategies in tourism [20].NTOs' placed social media in the center of their marketing operations which enabled the two-way communication with tourists, posting in real time, tracking traveler movement and decision making in a destination in goal to achieve a comparative advantage on the market.

SOCIAL MEDIA IN TOURISM
Social media is one of the most significant phenomena of the present times, and its reshaping communication as we know it, at both personal and business level [21].According to statistics from 2018 [22], there were about 2,46 billion social media users in 2017, which estimates at 71 percent of all internet users, and these figures are ever increasing.
One of the industries in which social media has significant influence is tourism and hospitality.Travel industry itself is experiencing growth every year and has become one of the most dynamic sectors for economic development and job creation [23].Results highlight that tourism directly contributed 23 trillion US$ in 2016, and indirectly '7.6 trillion $ to the global economy, and supported 292 million jobs' [23].The numbers equal to 10.2% of the world's GDP, and approximately 1/10 of all posts.Authors [24] confirm social media support this growth and that it is playing a dominant role in traveling, from planning, using social media in a destination, to sharing travel experiences [25].Therewithal, researches [26] carry out that travelers not only exchange knowledge; they also share experiences through social media.These are not just facts about travel attributes such as information about the destination, attractions and weather conditions, but through posts on social media, they may additionally include imaginations, visions, and emotions about holiday features.
There is a big difference in how social media in tourism was used and how it has used today [27].Experts [28] outlined that social media platforms enable travelers to initialize and share online knowledge, emotions and experiences and experiential moments much broader than before which revolutionize primarily undisclosed and private experiences to global databases which can be interpreted and analyzed by tourism institutions and organizations.
Social media role in the travel industry surfaced from marketing tool for destination and product promotion to a system that enables to create market positioning, creating personalized supply and hence, gain competitive advantage.
The most prominent SM are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.With millions of users worldwide, they facilitate strong involvement from both the public and private sector [29].
Twitter, as the most popular microblog and is presenting what is going on in the world [30].
Twitter is the social media selected for the analysis considering its forceful relevance for the tourism industry as the main e-WOM generator and destination branding channel [31].

TOURISM ACTIVITY OF EUROPEAN COUNTRIES
Tourism is the sector of high importance in the European Union due to the fact that the EU countries are the most visited globally with more than half of international arrivals [32].Tourism generates one third all jobs and contributes its economic and strategic purposes [33].The primary goal for the EU considering tourism is to attain the optimal balance of tourism activities in the member countries [34].EU assize, quoted by the Coles et al. [35] state that: 'European tourism needs to be managed with foresight, proactively rather than retrospectively responding to change, with its managers more keenly sensitized to the regularity of enlargement events, adjustments in EU governance, economic and social reorganizations in existing and new member states, and the potential restructuring of markets'.
Tourism significance for EU is unquestionable.Yet, many fast-growing economies are attracting numerous travelers and decreasing market share from EU countries [36].In fact, eight from ten most visited countries were not from the European Union, according to Business Insider [37].
In order to maintain their tourism championship status, EU countries must continually pursue scope for further growth, and economic development.The utilization of social media in order to expand their marketing strategies, and gain a competitive advantage is one of the most prominent and efficient strategies at the moment [38].
Figure 1 shows 28 EU countries and information on their population and nights spent in 2018.
The most populated countries are Germany, the UK, and France, and the least populated countries are Estonia, Latvia, and Luxembourg.In most cases, high population follows high overnight rate and vice versa.Although, there are some exceptions, such as he Spain, which obtains the highest number of overnight stays (467 million) and is inhabited whit just 46 million residents.Moreover, France and Italy have significantly more overnights that are populated, and Croatia emerges as a country that Croatia has by far the most significant difference among population and nights spend.Furthermore, countries such as Poland and Romania show the distribution in favor of a population, with fewer tourists overnight.However, the lowest populated countries have the lowest tourism results as well.

SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVITY OF EUROPAN NTOs
Table 1 outlines the social media appearance for 28 EU member countries.
Facebook is the social media, which is the most, represented among EU countries, 27 of 28 European countries NTOs have an official Facebook account.Only Belgium does not have an official Facebook account due to the country's marketing strategy to promote three separate regions instead of the country as a unity.The fact that Facebook is the most used social media among EU countries is consistent with social media popularity.Records from January 2019, verify Facebook as the most used social network worldwide, with nearly 2,3 billion users [39].
Twitter and Instagram are the second disseminated network among European countries; only Belgium and Latvia are countries that have not created official accounts.

SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVITY OF EUROPAN NTOs
Twitter account languages and the date NTO of EU countries joined the Twitter network has been presented in Table 2.
Column 'Twitter account language' displays the language of the Twitter post on each official NTO account.Most account post on the English language in order to obtain a more farreaching audience and being understood on the global level.However, Austria and Bulgaria came up as an exception: Austrian profile post on the German language and Bulgaria is posting some content on English, some on the Bulgarian language on Cyrillic alphabet.Austrian reasons could be the drive to preserve authenticity as a marketing strategy, which is their policy for all events that take place in their country.As for Bulgaria, posts on local language could be intended for the residents.The approach turns out favorable for Austria, as the number of their followers and tourism, but not so much for Bulgaria which scores low both in tourism both in Twitter popularity ratings.
The column 'Join' presents the dates for when each countries NTO joined the Twitter network.Twitter initially launched 13 July 2006, anyhow, its relevance for the tourism sector has been recognized and widely utilized since 2008 [30].Austria NTO was the first one to establish an official Twitter account.That could be one more reason why the country created an account on national language.Many countries followed up shortly, with more than half of the official accounts ( Spain is the country that emerged as with the strongest activity of their NTO's Twitter account among EU countries in the most categories included.As for the engagement categories: Tweets, Following, Events, and Multimedia, Spain emanates as the first or the second rated in the three of the four categories.That could be connected to the fact that Spain has the largest number of followers, among those countries included in the research, and is the second by likes of all the countries.Furthermore, Spain is not only the champion of the Twitter data results, is the country with the overall nights in EU, so the marketing strategy of the country could be taken as an example for developing models or frameworks.Withal, all countries rated highly in engaging categories, such as Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, and Italy, have more overnight stays than the population which implicates tourism success.Contrarily, countries with the lowest engagement, as Bulgaria, produce low tourism results.

TWITTER MEDIA ACTIVITY OF EUROPAN NTOs
Twitter activity across EU countries for NTOs' profiles are given in Table 3.Among Europan NTOs, 26 of 28 have their official Twitter accounts, except Belgium and Latvia.Belgium's tourism Twitter accounts are distributed in three regions: Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels.However, Belgium does not have a unique Twitter account at the national level.In addition, Latvia's NTO does not' have a Twitter account at all, while Latvia has Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and Youtube media.
The first column represents all countries that are members of the European Union.The second column shows the number of tweets of the given country.Tweets are 'text-based posts long of up to 140 characters available to account followers' [40].Portugal NOT produced the largest number of tweets among all the European countries, followed by Spain and then Greece.Slovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria emerge as the European countries with the smallest number of tweets.
The third column indicates the number of followers followed by specific country.Spain, which also is the country with the most travelers overnight stays, is the most active in following other accounts.The second most active country by following is Slovenia, then Portugal.Bulgaria, Romania, and Estonia are the most passive in following other Twitter accounts, among the EU countries.
The fourth column shows the number of followers for the given NTOs' Twitter accounts.Spain has the highest number in the follower's category and represents the only country which has more than 300 million followers.Hungary NTO has the second largest number of followers, and Italian NTO is rated as the third.Countries that have the least followers for their NTO accounts are Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Lithuania.Among them, the Bulgarian NTO has by far the least number of followers.
The fifth column represents how many likes each country has.The Chez Republic, Spain, and Germany have obtained the most likes from their followers.Oppositely Bulgaria, Malta, and Hungary have the least likes on their posts.The sixth column 'Lists/events' stage event announcements held in the country.Italy, Germany, and Denmark distinguish themselves from other countries by the number of events.The seventh column shows multimedia content on the country profiles.Multimedia content of the top three countries by publishing number, are mostly referring to the photos of the culture, architecture, history, and nature of the given country.Spain, Italy, and Greece publish mostly photos on their profiles, and Sweden, Austria, and Romania post the smallest number on their Twitter accounts.
Figure 2 shows the connection among the number of Tweets and total likes and followers, indicating the connection among three variables exists in most of the countries Twitter account.
The majority of the countries that have the largest number of tweets have alo the largest number of followers.Tourism champions that like Spain, Greece, and Italy, subsume a high number of Tweets followed by the high level of followers.Ten of twenty-six counties included in the investigations have more followers than likes and tweets and achieve positive tourism results.However, there some outliers presented as well.
For instance, Hungary has among the least number of Tweets and is the second-rated by the number of Followers.That could be connected with external influences, such as interest for the countries.Another outlier is Portugal which has an excessive number of Tweets but now followed by the followers.The Chez Republic is an example of inconsistencies as well with the high number of likes, and a lower number of followers.This relationship could be investigated with content analysis of the posts to explore the high engagement of the followers.Notwithstanding the outliers, the relationship among the variables given is unassailable, and the knowledge that excessive tweeting can influence on the popularity of the Twitter account can be useful for NTO's and companies.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN TWITTER ACTIVITY OF NTOs AND TOURISM ACTIVITY OF EUROPAN COUNTRIES
Table 4 and Figure 3. analytically and visually confirm the connection between tourism activity and Twitter account activity.As the preliminary research in this area, the correlation analysis of the following variables was conducted: 'Nights spend in tourism accommodations,' 'Number of Tweets,' 'Following,' 'Followers' and 'Likes'.Variable connections showed weak (0-0,25), medium (0,25-0,5) and strong correlation (0,5-0,75).
Outcome results confirmed the relationship among all variables included.
The variable 'Nights spent in tourist accommodation' is taken as a tourism success measure.
The results indicate that all Twitter activity has a connection with the nights spent in the tourist accomodation in observed countries.The number of followers and the nights spent in the tourist accomodation have the medium correlation; and the number of tweets and the nights spent in the tourist accomodation show weak correlation.The fact confirms that both 'Tweets' and 'Following' are relevant variables measuring Twitter activity, while the 'Followers' and 'Likes' are relevant variabless measuring Twitter account popularity.However, it could be premature to conclude that Twitter activity influences the tourist arrivals in a specific countriy.The example of Spain whose results came on top of both following,   followers and nights spend in category indicates that this could be true.On the other hand, it is possible that countries with strong tourism activity also invest more in tourism marketing, and thus in social media marketing, specifically Twitter marketing.

Number
Variable 'Number of Tweets' measures the activity of the Twitter account.It shows the medium-level correlation with all activity and popularity measures.That would presume that Twitter accounts who tweet more, also follow more different Twitter accounts and, therefore, produce more activity which positively correlates with popularity measures such as the number of followers and likes.The number of tweets category confirm the insights from Figure 2 which connects a number of tweets to the number of followers and likes.Both results imply that the higher engagement to the account, the higher popularity will result.
Variable 'Following' shows the strong correlation with the variable 'Followers.'The indication is that more the account follows other profiles and shows activity, it becames more visible and is more engaging, so, consequently gains more followers.Furthermore, more popular accounts, which have more followers tend to engage even more, so they follow and post more often in order to get even better results.
Lastly, the variables 'Likes' and 'Followers' show a weak correlation.It is more likely that the NTO's EU country profile with more followers will also have more likes altogether.
Figure 3 supports the conclusion of Table 3. Scatter diagram shows the strongest correlation among Following and the Followers category.The second pair of variables with the strongest correlation is 'Following' and 'The number of tweets' variables.However, scatter diagrams indicate that substantial number of outliers is present among the given data and that the further research is needed in this area.

CONCLUSION
The goal of the research was to investigate social media activity of European NTOs', with the focus to Twitter utilization.By answering three research questions, the importance of social media has been pointed out, and the connection among social media activity and tourism results has been entrenched.
The first research question examined social media activity of NTOs of European countries.The majority of the countries observed have all four social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Instagram).The analyzed confirmed countries awareness to the importance of social media utilization as the indispensable factor of nation's promotion and branding.The research outputted that more than 97 % of European countries use at least one social media and that over 93 % of NTO`s actively use the combination of social media in order to reach a varied audience, spread WOM, and promote their tourism.Social media mechanisms substantiated as to the most powerful marketing and strategy channel nowadays.
Twitter evinced as the most useful social media in tourism sector because of its strong impact on the WOM and the possibility to shape tourism supply based on user preference extracted from Twitter.Many European countries recognized the benefits of Twitter for creating destination image and branding, as well as developing long term destination strategic plan based on Twitter utilization.Instagram has the main advantage in its wide popularity, plus the emerging number of travel bloggers who have the power to promote destination and influence users significantly.
Our results confirm the previous research, that social media uses among EU countries grew from 2012 when more than half countries did not have official accounts to nowadays when they are the omnipresent and far-reaching influential tool and the source of competitive advantage [41].
The second research question focused on the coherence among countries according to the time of establishment and language of Twitter accounts in European countries.It has been established that almost all countries post on the English language due to the goal of viral reach and comprehension.However, two countries post on local languages and alphabets, and looking at their overall results, they turned out lower than the average according to their Twitter NTOs' activity, so this could be considered as the possible reason.Most of the countries NTOs established their Twitter accounts not later than in 2012.Time of joining Twitter accounts could be associated with countries interest in tourism marketing development, but some of the European tourism champions like Italy and Ireland created their accounts later.Although both Ireland and Italy created their Twitter accounts later, they have nowdays more tweets and followers than Austria and Germany, who created their accounts as the first.An explanation can manifest in the fact that all the countries created their account in a relatively short period and no country is considered as an outlier, so their outputs mainly depend on their engagement and activity and not on time of the account establishment.Last research question investigated the possible relationship between Twitter activity and country characteristics.Results indicated the moderate correlation between Twitter activity and the tourism results for the European countries.Furthermore, the correlation between Twitter activities and the popularity of the specific profiles appeared.The strongest relationship in the correlation matrix was 'Following' and the 'Followers' category, and the all other connection among 'activity' categories and 'popularity' of the account was confirmed.Therefore, the conclusion is that countries who engage more, tweet and post more, outcome better results and have more followers and likes.This is valuable knowledge for both the academy and practice as well.
In addition, cases of the best practice emerged, Spain turned out to produce among top three results in almost all categories, and all countries who engage and post frequently turned out to have more followers, and great tourism results in terms of overnight stays.On the other hand, countries having lower activity, in addition, produce lower results.Therefore, the conclusions of our research could be useful for the practice of the smaller countries, whilst investigation reported lower results in both tourism and Twitter outputs.Smaller countries should invest more in social media activities because of the word-of-mouth impact and the viral reach of social media.Croatia and Slovenia could serve as an excellent example of social media utilization in smaller countries [42].This knowledge could serve both for researches and businesses to investigate more of the factor which impacts this correlation in order to generate new models to business strategies.
Limitations of the research are as following.First, the correlations among Twitter activity and tourism outputs are calculated based on the raw data on the country level, thus indicating that this research poses as the preliminary.Second, the causative and consecutive connections between Twitter activity of NTO and tourism activity in a specific country remains ambiguous, and further investigations should be focused to unveil if Twitter results impact on the tourism output.Moreover, instances that disclosed as 'outliers' can be valuable for future investigations as well.For instance, Chez Republic Twitter activity displayed a prevalent number of likes, and yet a number of followers which could be interesting for more comprehensive research of which factors implicate on the frequent engagement of followers, while their number remains lower.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.EU countries by populations and nights spent in tourism accommodation (2018, in mil).Source: authors' work, based on Eurostat data.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.The relationship among tourism activity and Twitter account activity.

Table 1 .
Social media activity of NTOs of European countries.Source: authors' work.

Table 2 .
Twitter account language and joining date for NTO EU countries.Source: authors' work.
15 of 26) established in 2009.Only two countries besides Austria had Twitter since 2008, Germany and Spain.Last countries that created a Twitter account were Luxembourg, Italia, and Ireland, in late 2011, or at the beginning of 2012.The last country joined in February 2012, so all Twitter accounts are at least seven years active.

Table 3 .
Twitter of European NTOs across countries.Source: authors' work based on Twitter accounts on EU countries.

Table 4 .
The relationship among tourism activity and Twitter account activity.