ABSTRACT
Twitter has opened new possibilities to national DMOs to promote their countries, increase awareness, achieve influence, enhance their visibility and distinguish them from the competition. The paper explores the mentions/replies (m/r) networks of 37 national DMOs in Europe to find out whether followers of accounts form communities. By recording Clustering coefficient, degree-Skewness, Average shortest path and Assortativity, this research explores whether the properties of small-world formation, scale-free networks and homophily are present. Next, this study using PCA and Cluster Analysis distinguishes two clusters of accounts and associates them to their popularity and performance regarding established Twitter performance indexes. Although community characteristics can be identified to a very limited extent, there exists a small group of high performance accounts for which community characteristics are more apparent.
