A Facebook Campaign about Heritage and Tourism: Its Results and how to Measure them

While the role of ICTs both for tourism purposes and heritage promotion is widely acknowledged, the specific role that social media might have in influencing awareness about heritage-related issues and travel behaviors at heritage sites is still under-investigated. In this paper a research is presented, conducted in a quasi-experimental setting, aimed at assessing a social media campaign. Goals of the campaign were to raise awareness about World Heritage Sites (WHSs), promote (informal) learning about them, and raise interest and willingness to visit them. Students of two universities – in Switzerland and in Italy – have been surveyed in order to assess their knowledge about UNESCO inscribed WHSs in Switzerland and in the Italian Lombardy Region. The survey has also explored the students’ interest in WHSs, as well as their travel intentions and behaviors when it comes to visit cultural destinations. Then, a campaign has been launched on Facebook, presenting all the UNESCO-inscribed properties in the two selected areas. The campaign has been co-designed by a class of Bachelor students of one of the involved institutions, so to ensure a better understanding of the interests and styles of their peers. Two months later, a post-campaign survey has been launched in order to measure how many students had been exposed to the campaign – both remembering it explicitly or being able to recognize it if presented with some of its messages. Moreover, the students’ (informal) learning about the covered WHSs, their intention to visit them and their actual visits have been assessed. Goal of this research was also to test if there is a relationship between an increased knowledge about the heritage sites of a region and an increased willingness to travel to such heritage sites. The comparison of the two surveys’ results has shown that the students’ awareness about heritage sites in general, and Swiss and Lombard sites in particular, has increased after the campaign’s implementation, while the intentions to visit and the actual visitation of the promoted sites seem not to have been influenced by the campaign. This paper allows drawing suggestions for researchers and professionals working in the tourism field, especially for those dealing with cultural heritage and its promotion through digital technologies, as it allows understanding the potential of the constructive use of social media for sensitizing the youths towards heritage-related topics.