Persuasion Strategies in Creating Tourism Content on Digital Platforms and Their Relationship to Tourism Development Among the Saudi Public: An Analytical Study of the YouTube Platform

Authors

College of Humanities and Social Sciences, King Saud University

Abstract

The study aimed to identify the persuasive strategies used in the production of tourism content by official tourism sector accounts in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on YouTube. These accounts include: the Ministry of Tourism, Visit Saudi, Experience AlUla, Soudah Peaks, The Red Sea, and Diriyah. The study focused on analyzing the nature and forms of persuasive content employed by these accounts in promoting tourism development among the Saudi audience.
Guided by a theoretical framework of eleven persuasive appeals: rational, emotional, celebrity, statistic, fear, scarcity, humor, social, snob, and testimonial. The study utilized a survey method to analyze and examine the videos published by these accounts over a six-month period.
The findings revealed that the emotional appeal strategy was the most frequently used, accounting for 33.9% of all persuasive strategies, followed by the testimonial appeal at 14.5%.
The results also showed that promotional-themed videos represented the highest percentage in terms of content nature, comprising 50% of the total, followed by seasonal-themed content at 35.5%. In terms of format, the findings indicated that the advertising-style were the most commonly used format among the videos in the sample.

Keywords

References

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