EVALUATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGIES OF MAHARASHTRA TOURISM DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION (INDIA) FROM THE TOURISTS’ PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

Maharashtra is an important tourism state in India. With the increasing importance of social media market ing, Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporat ion, the destination marketing organisation of the state, is taking serious efforts to utilize this unique medium for successful promotion of tourism on international level. Here, the paper aims to evaluate the social media market ing strategies of MTDC through user judgment approach. After extensive review of literature, the researcher has proposed the instrument to measure the performance of the social media market ing strategies for destination promotion from tourists’ perspective. The developed instrument measured the performance on the basis of 3 critical success factors: Variety of contents and Quality of contents. Reliability and validity tests applied, confirmed the usefulness of the instrument. Tourist ratings (collected from 300 respondents) have made the researcher to understand the preferred attributes for social media market ing. “t test” was used for data analysis. The findings revealed that there is a huge gap (significant difference) between the importance and performance of various identified attributes. Therefore, constructive suggestions were given for improvement of the identified crit ical success factors . The findings are helpful for DMO to acknowledge online information preferences and E-consumer behavior.