Building City Brand through Social Media

The recent transition from city marketing to city branding heralds a new era of representation and signification of cities as brands where conscious and planned practices are used to promote them as any other economic commodity. Given the tremendous impact of social media on brand image, city branding has to embrace this new channel to promote their cities as brands. On social media platforms users forming a brand community can significantly influence the brand image by co-creating the user-generated contents. Today, users search for information online and their behaviors and responses are influenced by online social networks and community practices. In addition, they perceive information from online social community highly credible and useful. As traditional firm generated information is losing its persuasive power to social media, it is never late for managers of city branding to embark on social media platforms to support online social media brand communities which in turn would influence city brand image positively by engaging users. Social media provides an excellent platform for users to form social media brand communities, where they can share inside knowledge and discuss about brands. The greater credibility of user generated contents on these platforms can significantly influence the user perception about the brands. The focus of this paper is to investigate challenges and opportunities of online social media brand communities in influencing brand image.