Social media plan for Quy Nhon city

Abstract

This thesis looks into the case of Quy Nhon city, a small coastal city in the central of Vietnam. Despite several attractions and raw nature beauties, plus the richness in culture and local cuisine, the city still struggles to boost its tourism reputation among domestic and international travelers. The reason for this is due to the lack of a formal social media plan to offer official and correct information for tourists’ trip planning process. Therefore, the aim of the thesis is to establish a social media plan for Quy Nhon, using the most popular channels like Facebook, Instagram and website. Acorddingly, the research question is formulated as: What is the new suggested social media plan for Quy Nhon city? To answer this question, the relevant theoretical knowledge about social media characteristics in Web 2.0 era, place branding, the application of social media in place branding and marketing plan were reviewed. Furthermore, the thesis’s emperical data were collected by quantitative method’s interview. There were 8 interviews carried out in total, 1 in-depth interview with the Director of the City’s Tourism Department and 7 individual interviews with selected subjects. These subjects are chosen for their suitable traits with the research and the author: from 20 to 27 years old, living in Metropolitan area including Helsinki, Espoo and Vantaa, being occasional or frequent traveler, active social media user and use those channels to make travel destination decisions.All interviews were recorded with the interviewees’ consent and kept anonymous for ethical consideration of the research.The data from the interviews got transcribed, translated if necessary, and then analyzsed to answer the research question. The final result was achieved, with a detail social media plan created via Facebook, Instagram and website. Taking the respondents’ opinions into account, the channels were developed based on market analysis, social media component implementation, resources accessability and allocation, and last but not least monitor and measurement. Limitations like age group, geo-location of the studied subjects and the choice of only 3 channels in the vastly dimension of social media provide opportunities for future researches to fill in the gap.