E-Marketing, Effective Tool for Tourism

Nelson Mandela Bay Tourism launched a new website in April 2010 and have since monitored the figures to see how effective this marketing tool has been in terms of both foreign and domestic visits to the site and the city. From April to June the visits increased with 5.4% from 28,538 to 29,976 with 18,557 being unique visitors. The top ten countries to visit the site where recorded as the following:

1          South Africa                 22,880

2          United Kingdom           1,640

3          United States               817

4          Germany                      321

5          (not set)                      315

6          China                            297

7          Brazil                            228

8          Australia                       221

9          Argentina                     202

10        Netherlands                 146

Other online initiatives included online newsletters, competitions and campaign reflecting e-mail signatures to keep internal communication up to date, it was however NMBT’s social media initiatives which proved to be most effective for information distribution and interaction. Blogs, micro-blogging and Wikipedia were some of the tools employed while Facebook saw the following statistics from its 1013 fans:

·         Total Interactions 939

·         Likes 636

·         Comments 260

·         Wall Posts 43

·         Posts 289

·         New Fans 697

·         Page Views 8327

Photo sharing on Flicker and video sharing on Youtube used visual e-marketing to attract visitors to the Bay with the Youtube videos receiving 14,122 video views and 502 channel views.