Digital sustainability communication of destination management organizations: evaluating communication efficiency of social media marketing for sustainable tourism in Uzbekistan

How effectively do tourism organizations use social media to promote sustainability? This question is becoming increasingly pressing as digital channels reshape the way destinations are marketed around the world. We address it by proposing a Communication Efficiency Questionnaire (CEQ), a structured assessment tool designed to capture how thoroughly Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) weave sustainability themes into their online presence. The CEQ was applied to the official Telegram channels of 14 national and regional DMOs across Uzbekistan, covering 37 indicators grouped into four dimensions: technical infrastructure, environmental messaging, socio-cultural content, and economic communication. The results expose a sharply uneven landscape. Composite scores spanned from 4.76 to 19.67 on a 37-point scale, with Bukhara at the top, a position that coincides with its exceptionally deep cultural heritage, followed by the national Tourism Committee and Samarkand. Crucially, what separated the strongest performers from the weakest was not their technical capacity but the depth and variety of their actual sustainability content. Correlation analysis showed that the three sustainability dimensions cluster together tightly (socio-cultural and economic: r = 0.898, p < 0.001), whereas the technical dimension was only loosely coupled to sustainability content, its association with socio-cultural messaging ( r = 0.462) not reaching statistical significance. The practical takeaway is straightforward: expanding a channel's digital toolkit alone will not generate more meaningful sustainability messaging. This study contributes a preliminary but transferable benchmarking framework and underscores the need for content-driven strategies over technology-first interventions. Because the findings rest on a cross-sectional sample of 14 channels, they are best read as exploratory.

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