YouTube usage by Spanish tourist destinations as a tool to communicate their identities and brands

Videos are influential image creators and video-sharing sites like YouTube offer new opportunities to DMOs to communicate the identity and the brand of the destinations they represent. The aim of this article was to gain an insight into how Spanish DMOs use YouTube to communicate their promotional videos and to study whether these videos communicate brands through two main elements: attraction factors and emotional values. The research methodology combined an analysis of two important communicative variables of the official YouTube channels (interactivity and visibility) of the analysed destinations with a content analysis of the last 25 videos uploaded to those channels by the DMOs. On the one hand, results showed that the usage of YouTube by Spanish tourist destinations was widespread but with some limitations. The contents of the videos were mainly informative, and this helped to communicate attraction factors rather than emotional values. On the other hand, the presence of brand values is usually related to good results in terms of visibility and interactivity. The article contributes to good practices and recommendations to communicate territories’ brands via YouTube.