The impact of social media marketing strategies on promoting sustainability of tourism with fuzzy cognitive mapping: a case of Kalanggaman Island (Philippines)

The current literature has espoused the role of social media platforms in promoting tourism destinations. Despite such advances, limited works are reported on how social media foster the sustainability of tourist destinations. This work builds upon the argument that sustainable tourism (ST) agenda and initiatives can be integrated alongside the traditional competitive mission of social media marketing as a communications strategy of tourism stakeholders. With such an argument and the scarce literature on the topic, this paper analyzes the impact of social media strategies on marketing indicators contextualized within ST. In addressing this objective, a fuzzy cognitive mapping technique is adopted to examine the changes in marketing performance indicators given an initial set of activation values of social media marketing strategies. A case study in Kalanggaman Island (Philippines), an emerging tourist destination, is carried out to demonstrate the evaluation process. Three policy scenarios with interrelated social media marketing strategies are examined: minimal effort, moving visuals, and collaborative strategies. The minimal effort scenario increases counting metrics, comments, and Web traffic, while the moving visuals scenario yields increases in reach, counting metrics, comments, and Web traffic. Finally, the collaborative strategies scenario enhances indicators on awareness, the share of voice, counting metrics, comments, and lead. The findings generated from the proposed framework provide policy- and decision-makers a platform for analyzing possible social media policies in disseminating the ST agenda.