A full audit on Dubai Tourism. Social and Digital mentions of Dubai and their impact on the globe. A social media audit of Visit Dubai accounts and recommendations for what's to come.

1. By: Praful Anchaliya (@Prafsa)
DEPARTMENT OF TOURISM AND COMMERCE MARKETING, DUBAI

2. This section covers the overall mentions of Dubai (‫)دبي‬ and analysis of:
• Top Discussed Subjects
• Language Breakdown
• Share of Voice
• Sentiment Analysis
• Comparison of Destinations

3. Volume of Mentions
550,000
500,000
715,000
625,000
575,000
1,115,000
725,000
625,000
775,000
700,000
575,000
500,000
600,000
400,000
500,000
600,000
700,000
800,000
900,000
1,000,000
1,100,000
1,200,000
Jul-14 Aug-14 Sep-14 Oct-14 Nov-14 Dec-14 Jan-15 Feb-15 Mar-15 Apr-15 May-15 Jun-15 Jul-15
Dubai (‫)دبي‬
Highlights:
• On an average Dubai receives 644k mentions/month on Social
• Majority of these mentions are related to the events in Dubai
• There was a significant spike in the no. of mentions in December 2014. This was a result of a no. of
events such as UAE National Day, Rugby Sevens Cup, IPTL, Indian Property Show, We Run DXB, Amr
Diab & Hussain Al Jassimi Live Concert, Real Madrid Vs. AC Milan and NYE

4. TOP DISCUSSED SUBJECTS
500,000
600,000
700,000
800,000
900,000
1,000,000
1,100,000
1,200,000
Jul-14 Aug-14 Sep-14 Oct-14 Nov-14 Dec-14 Jan-15 Feb-15 Mar-15 Apr-15 May-15 Jun-15 Jul-15
Dubai (‫)دبي‬
Ramadan – 2014
Eid In Dubai 2014
DSS - 2014
Comedy Nights
Lady Gaga
Dubai Camel Race
Gitex
Eid
Pak Vs. Aus
Color Run
UAE National Day
IPTL
We Run DXB (Nike)
Amr Diab & Hussain Al Jasimmi Live
New Year’s Eve
Burj Khalifa Fireworks
DSF
Bon Jovi
SC Marathon
RedFest DXB
Ed Sherran
Michael Buble
Drake
Gitex
One Direction
ME Comic Con
Arabian Travel Market
Arab Media Forum
Ramadan – 2015
Eid In Dubai 2015

5. LANGUAGE BREAKDOWN
66%
62%
60%
69%
34%
38%
40%
31%
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
2012
2013
2014
2015
Arabic
English
Highlights:
• Over the course of past 4 years, English have seem to dominate the overall language breakdown on
the Social Networks
• But it’s also a clear indication of growing Arabic over these channels. Twitter is a profound example
of Arabic usage, where the actual breakdown is 50:50 for both the languages

6. SHARE OF VOICE
44%
21%
21%
9%
5%
Share of Voice - Overall
Social Networks
Blogs
News
Forums
Message Boards
35%
26%
22%
10%
7%
Share of Voice - Social
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
LinkedIn
YouTube
Highlights:
• Social Network have had an increasing
impact on how people communicate; Year
on Year, it is seen that mentions for Dubai
have been growing most on Social Media
• The breakdown of Social is shown below
Highlights:
• 67% of (4m+) Facebook audience in Dubai
is seen active, hence major contributor in
share of voice
• Twitter & Instagram make a significant
chunk of mentions for Dubai, both
increasing rapidly

7. SENTIMENT ANALYSIS
23%
65%
12%
Positive
Neutral
Negative
Highlights:
• Neutral conversation around the brand
#Dubai is noted to be the most. Majority
coming from Dubai residents
• Positive conversations are posted from
around the globe by users who have either
visited or wish to share their plans to visit
• Negative conversations are generic
perceptions of users

8. COMPARISON OF Burj’s
• Burj Al Arab
• Burj Khalifa
Highlights:
• Mentions of two iconic buildings in Dubai Burj Al Arab and Burj Khalifa have been on par with their
own averages per month
• The user interactions with their two keywords increase significantly at any event such as NYE
fireworks, Eid and special occasions such as “Dubai winning the bid for Expo 2020”

9. HEAT MAP
Highlights:
• Majority of the mentions of Visit Dubai emerge from the UAE
• This is quickly followed by countries like India and KSA

10. This section covers the monitoring of Social Accounts of Visit Dubai (DTCM):
• Facebook and summary
• Twitter and summary
• Instagram and summary
• YouTube and summary

11. FACEBOOK
Highlights:
• Visit Dubai page on Facebook has over 2m fans now. With an average of growth of 80k fans/month,
the engagement rate has shot up by 1%
• Average post for Visit Dubai receives 11k likes, 1k shares and 150+ comments. Paid posts likely
receive 20k+ likes, 2k shares and 300+ comments

12. FACEBOOK (Videos)
Highlights:
• Videos on Facebook have increased engagement since the beginning of 2015 (Facebook’s change to
the feed algorithm). Visit Dubai’s videos have disproportionate numbers of views and engagement
• The destination videos showcasing Dubai has highest number of views as Dubai is portraying itself
as iconic city to live and work in. Videos of key stake holders like Gordon Ramsay have 4X views than
that of a Brazilian Footballer

13. FACEBOOK SUMMARY
Insights:
• Video length seen on Visit Dubai videos exceed slightly from the average view time (90 – 120 seconds, as
seen in historic data)
• Destination videos have more views than any other, its highly recommended to produce more of these
• Videos with stake holders both global and regional seem to perform above average
• Best timings to post on Facebook for Visit Dubai have seen a great performance trend of evenings (6PM –
8PM) on weekdays along with afternoons on weekends (2PM – 4PM)
Recommendations:
• The 15-second Insta-cuts have seen to be well received by audience in general for all brands on
Facebook, therefore, is highly recommended to produce a Dubai based theme music showcasing
destinations, events, lifestyle, people and vision of HH. Shk. Mohd. for upcoming projects
• Occasionally we can run an influencer activation for various forms of ~Q&A~, pertaining to culture,
heritage, business, work-life balance and events. This could potentially kill the negative sentiment and
portray Dubai to be the best city to live and work in. (After Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg started
doing this, it has become very effective on this network)

14. TWITTER
Highlights:
• With an average engagement of 90 actions (retweets+replies+favorites), the two and a half year old
twitter account is seeing a rapid growth
• Twitter is the only channel where mentions of ‫دبي‬ in earned media are higher than ‘Dubai’

15. TWITTER SUMMARY
Insights:
• Twitter has great potential in both languages, EN & AR. Our channel has seen significant growth in 2015,
due to increased activity
• Destination tweets (having iconic buildings around Dubai) have seen better engagement than other
content, hence response time could be the key to success here
Recommendations:
• We should leverage and lean on our stake holders to increase our reach on Twitter. These stake holders
could be anyone from His Highnesses, our Airline (Emirates) to holding companies (Dubai Holding)
• Twitter automated video play just like Facebook two-months ago. This is a great feature for having 15-
second insta cuts as well as 6-second vine vidoes
• Across the globe, Twitter (higher than other networks) has become a hub for consumer complaints for
most brands; this could be cut down by having a proper SLA for response time and few influencer
activations where #VisitDubai holds an influencer campaign to gain more visibility and acquire audience
worldwide
• #MyDubai is widely picked after HH Shk. Hamdan started it in early 2014. As many times as we could lean
on this hashtag will have positive impact on our engagement

16. INSTAGRAM
Highlights:
• An average of 409 likes and 8 commments per image were recorded over the course of past month
on our Instagram channel
• In early 2014, when we started posting on this channel, we received 40 likes/image, it has grown by
1000% till today. But Instagram is a lot faster than this and have high potential of engagement

17. INSTAGRAM SUMMARY
Insights:
• We received about 12k likes and 217 comments on Instagram in the month of July over 30 images posted
• Images containing landmarks have performed better than rest of the content and this goes to prove that
these are the most popular destinations across this city. It also tells us that, majority of our audience
follow us on all channels
• Instagram images with low resolutions have seen to be having lower engagement against those with
higher resolution
Recommendations:
• The 15-second instagram-videos are a great source of engagement. Historically, they have been seen to
perform above average
• Following for HH. Shk. Mohd. and HH. Shk. Hamdan are key to Instagram, as their engagement rate is
above 10% per image. We should repost them more often to increase our reach and impressions
• Cardboards of hashtags (could also be replicated for Twitter) surrounding our brand to be distributed at
our key destinations to increase earned media. #MyDubai is widely picked after HH Shk. Hamdan started
it in early 2014. As many times as we could lean on this hashtag will have positive impact on our
engagement

18. YOUTUBE
Highlights:
• With a little under 10k subscribers, Visit Dubai on YouTube is flat in terms of engagement
(Views+Comments+Likes+Dislikes)
• Just like for other channels, YouTube also has some best practices for video creation, posting which
ties into engagement increase and brand lift

19. YOUTUBE SUMMARY
Recommendations:
• As I deduced from historic data, most organic views on tourism/airline videos are coming from Indian
sub-continent, Australia, Far-East and Middle East. We have a huge audience base in these counties to
leverage
• We have to do a study on how YouTube ties into the native platforms such as Facebook and Twitter and
the non-native platforms such as our website
• Recently, the “Dream Jump” (base jumping from Prince Tower in Dubai Marina) and “Jetman” (Jetman
Flight) were featured in the top 10 videos by YouTube, hence the organic activity soared on both these
videos gaining them millions of views in about 24 hours of posting
• Activation of a series around various Dubai experiences, such as Dolphinarium, Creek, Free Zones,
International Airport, Museum, Sports Facilities, Desert Safari etc.

20. This section covers new ideas from where we can take on a different
approach and gather more reach and impressions for our brand:
• New Ideas & Strategy
• Recommendations
• Conclusion

21. An Upgraded Mobile App
• Introduce a mobile app for iOS, Windows and Android smartphone
• This app will stick as a tour guide to all tourists in coming into Dubai, can be marketed at Dubai
Airports

22. An Upgraded Mobile App
Insight:
• From the historic data of the Visit Abu Dhabi app campaign, we saw the
app being quickly having over 5k installs in 24-hours. Of course, this will
require a paid media-push
Recommendations:
• We can have integrated Govt. services, flight status, near by restaurant
suggests, a complete tour planning from 24-48 hours as we explain in our
recent video on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-
peUvHblzaQ)
• A great example is a restaurant reviewing app called Zomato.
It pings the user’s location to the server and their app icon
appears in the left hand side corner when-ever the user is near
a food-court/restaurant and if Zomato is offering anything
• This app can be in key languages of English, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese,
Korean etc.
• We can gather tons of data from this app to retarget and build custom
audience on platforms like Twitter and Facebook

23. Snapchat
• Introduction to Dubai snapchat stories
• Snapchat has been widely used amongst 14 – 30 years old and has gone from 100 million users to
over 350 million users in 1 year’s time

24. Snapchat
Insights:
• As of May, 2014, the app’s users were sending 700 million photos/videos per day. In UAE alone, 12% of
UAE have started to use snapchat regularly, it grew faster than other networks such as Twitter and
Instagram
• Other regions in MENA, are also in focus for 2015 Q3-Q4 and is noticing almost 17% of Qatari’s using
snapchat on daily basis
• Its about story-telling that puts narrative first, with the “Discover” feature of Snapchat we can create a
tab of “VisitDubai” and use more than 3 smartphones to map out Dubai
Recommendations:
• We can also contest residents for getting featured on Dubai story. This will allow us to maximize our
reach on Instagram, where we are missing out
• Snapchat already gives a variety of filters and options around Dubai to add to
your story
• A great example is @LondonGramer, is run by a guy named Dave Burt.
He also owns instagram.com/london which has 1.3m followers on Instagram.
His snapchats followers are about 10k now, and he creates stories daily.
His engagement levels are very high (over 45k/image) on Instagram and is
leveraging that to increase his Snapchat base

25. Beacons
Beacons are tracing devices:
• Across Dubai, if we induce beacons at major
landmarks, and throw in push notifications of a
variety of offers and make them shareable via Social
Media, it could be well received
• They work on simple GPS locators & tell you if there
is any offering in your nearby location
• This could be valuable to especially tourists more
than residents who here come for an experience
and shopping

26. FINDINGS & CONSLUSION
Summary:
• Our Social Media usage is sky rocketing day-by-day as we proceed, hence, we don’t need to introduce
any major change to that, it like a tree that grows on its own with time
• The volume of postings and levels of positive sentiment about Dubai on the ‘social-web’ far exceeds that
of mainstream news media
• High Highness Sheikh Mohammed and His Highness Sheikh Hamdan remains well-respected role models
amongst the global communities
• We have to focus on organization of our database and how can we upsell on the current offerings and if
need be, induce new pieces of technology that pertains to cultural relevance, popularity and usage
• We have to constantly create custom audiences and leverage Facebook day-to-day but not to forget
channels like Instagram and Snapchat which are becoming highly popular amongst residents as well as
tourists from all the parts of the globe
• To cut down the undesirable mentions of Dubai – the above ways will help us over-shadow that content
and give us leverage to promote our offerings around Dubai

28. FINDINGS & CONCLUSION
Summary:
• We can build social strategies around
the conversations:
• Graph on the right hand side
showcases the conversations
around Burj Khalifa Fireworks
• It clearly indicates the
popularity of the subject and
tells us that its only going to
increase in future (YoY)

29. FINDINGS & CONCLUSION
Summary:
• With regards to the interests overtime, Burj Khalifa and Dubai Mall remains most interesting to people
looking at Dubai on Google
• This indicates a call for a conversation growth model around Dubai downtown but not to forget key
properties in Dubai like Palm Island and Atlantis, they have fair share of interest as well
• Social Strategies can be infused within these conversations via custom audiences, creatives, insta-cuts
and snapchat to maximize our reach and popularity of Visit Dubai as a brand