Countries communicate as much, if not more than companies, to promote their images. The objectives of this national marketing, generally called Nation Branding, can be diverse but one of the most frequent, in all the countries of the world, is to attract tourists.
According to the Spanish consulting firm Bloom Consulting, which specializes in Nation Branding, Egypt is the most attractive African country for tourists. This is what the company concludes in its report Country Brand Ranking Tourism Edition 2022-2023. The study combines factors like economic performance, nation branding strategies and online presence of different countries to gauge their attractiveness to tourists from around the world.
The data that made the difference for Egypt, which dominates the African ranking for the second consecutive year, is its online presence, especially on social networks. The country’s online strategy even allows it to climb into the top 25 of global attractiveness for the first time in its history, despite the damage caused to its image and the terrorist attacks.
Behind Egypt, other regulars in the continental top 10, South Africa, Morocco and Mauritius have kept their rankings from the 2021 edition.
Tanzania, meanwhile, improved its rank. This change is interesting when we notice that in recent years Tanzania has mainly based the promotion of its country on the dissemination of messages about its natural landscapes and its culture via social networks.
Another interesting progress is that of Nigeria which gained five places just by improving its promotion on social networks. This may seem surprising when you remember that the country suspended Twitter for several months. At the same time, one of the points of contention of the federal republic with the social network was the fact that Twitter does not censor certain content linked to campaigns like #EndSars, against police violence, which gave a bad image to the country.
Overall, we can say that the ranking highlights the importance of social networks to attract tourists. This is justified even outside the top 10 with Rwanda, for example, which moved up 9 places and ranked 12th mainly by improving the promotion of its image online.
On the other hand, Kenya fell from 5th to 7th place, among other reasons, because of a drop in the effectiveness of its promotion on social networks.
Réagissez à cet article