Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive research of the effects of the intensity of use of social media on destination brand equity. The authors use the schema theory and a multidimensional approach of brand equity to analyse how social media communication affects brand awareness, brand image, customer value, brand quality and loyalty. Design/methodology/approach – The authors carried out a quantitative study through a personal survey with structured questionnaire. The study population were international tourists, over 18 years of age, who were visiting the city of Valencia, Spain. Respondents were asked to take the questionnaire upon arrival in Valencia, that is, before they had any direct experience of the tourist destination and when their knowledge of the city came only from the sources of social media information they have used. The final sample size was 249 interviewees. Findings – Findings confirm a positive effect of the intensity of social media use on brand awareness. Results also suggest that brand awareness influences other dimensions of brand equity and highlight the influence of the destination affective image on the intention to make WOM communication. Originality/value – Its originality lies in a unique approach for data collecting and using the schema theory of cognitive psychology to understand the phenomenon of social media influence on tourist perception of destination brands. The findings contribute to the development of better social media marketing in order to manage destination brands online.

Introduction

In the last two decades, social media have provoked a revolution in marketing communication, offering new possibilities for interaction between user and brand. This interaction has great relevance for brands because social network users rely on the advice they receive from other users (Schmitt et al., 2011), and this communication influences the decision-making process (Hinz et al., 2011). Organisations are aware of the need to understand the effects of social media on brand perception (Kumar et al., 2016). While social media researchers have focussed primarily on analysing particular social networks in isolation, such as Twitter (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2015), Facebook (De Vries et al., 2012; Schivinski and Dabrowski, 2015; Kumar et al., 2016) and online surveys of web pages (Tirunillai and Tellis, 2012), there are few studies that incorporate different types of social networks for comparative purposes, with exceptions (Smith et al., 2012; Schweidel and Moe, 2014). Without doubt, previous studies have contributed to a deeper understanding of communication in social media (Smith et al., 2012; Schweidel and Moe, 2014; Swaminathan, 2016), but few studies analyse the interaction of consumers with brands on different social media (Anderl et al., 2015). Given the large scale of use of social media, there is a lack of research analysing the influence of multiple social media on brand equity (Schivinski and Dabrowski, 2015; Keller, 2016; Gürhan-Canli et al., 2016). Taking into account the need for further research into brand equity in the digital age, and due to the lack of theoretical knowledge and empirical research on the role of social media in the formation of destination brands (Halkias, 2015; Llodrà-Riera et al., 2015; MSI, 2016), the present study focusses on the analysis of the effect of the intensity of use of different social media channels on destination brand equity (Llodrà-Riera et al., 2015; MSI, 2016). The structure of this paper is as follows: first, there is a literature review of the conceptualization of brand equity and its dimensions, and the influence of social media on the dimensions of brand equity and intention to recommend the brand by word of mouth communication. Next, the methodology of the research is described and the analysis and discussion of the results is given. Finally, the main conclusions of the study are described, highlighting the managerial implications, the main limitations of the study and possible future research lines.