adapt quickly to a new and changing reality. In general, DMOs are adapting to this transformation professionally and rapidly. However, because of the speed at which these changes are taking place, on many occasions, tourist destinations are using social media without knowing where they are present or what the effects of their strategies are, which tend to be more intuitive rather than strategic (Hvass and Munar, 2012; Hays, Page and Buhalis, 2013).

Even today, this media is used to inform, without dialogue (Fernández Cavia and Huertas, 2009), for fear of criticism or the lack of training (Huertas, 2014). Even so, social media is the communication directors’ most important channel to address their audiences, and its relevance is reflected in the significance communication directors themselves give to it. 90.4% of communication directors consider social media to be the most significant channel (Zerfass, Moreno, Tech, Vercic and Verhoeven, 2017), ahead of websites, online newspapers, events, radio stations, and television channels or traditional newspapers. Thus, the perception of the importance of social media has increased from 10% in 2007 to over 90% a decade later.

Destinations are increasingly opting for this type of communication, which has even led to changes in the structure of most destination communication and marketing departments (Wilches, 2014). Not surprisingly, the use of social media forces those in charge of destinations’ communication to update information (Domínguez and Araújo, 2012) continuously.

Among all social media, Facebook is still the most widely used today. The network founded by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 is one of the most popular websites worldwide. It has over 2.3 billion active users per month (Facebook, 2018), which composes almost half of the connected population (Internet World Stats, 2018). Facebook is thus one of the largest media organisations in history (Rieder, 2013).

Facebook is an indispensable element for the implementation of marketing activities (Stankov, Klauco, Vujicic, Vasiljevic, and Dragicevic, 2016). Facebook has proven to be very strong in the field of tourism communication, as it is used in each of the phases of travel planning described above: before the trip itself, when helping to inspire tourists, assisting planning and booking, and as a platform to share the experiences in the destination (Sparkler, 2014). This is why a coherent discourse on Facebook can help the destinations to generate a better brand image (Rodríguez, Llorente, and García, 2012).

In general, more and more destinations are realising the importance of effectively managing social media to gain a competitive advantage over other destinations (Pike and Page, 2014). Despite the widespread adoption of social media by both consumers and tourism providers in recent years, successfully managing and administrating social media remains mostly unknown to professionals and academics (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010; Leung, Law, van Hoof and Buhalis, 2013; Mariani, Di Felice, and Mura, 2016).

There are notably few studies on tourism organisations’ application of social media (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010; Hays et al., 2013; Huertas, Setó and Míguez, 2015). The studies carried out also have a series of methodological limitations (Hays et al., 2013), mainly due to the lack of robust metrics to capture social engagement (Mariani, Mura and Di Felice, 2018).