Abstract:

In the last decades, ports are focusing their branding activities on disseminating the social media messages to the port users. The building of brand equity for seaports is an essential goal in various branding strategies, within which social media has become the marketing tool to create a strong brand. However, researchers struggle to implement successful social media analytics on brand equity. For this reason, this paper investigates how practitioners may measure brand equity of their seaports by performing social media sentiment analysis. Another aim of this study is to find whether the social media statistics are good enough to measure the success of the port brand equity. Sentiment analysis is employed to assess a sample of 63.699 tweets by 45 seaports, selected from Europe, Middle East, Far East Asia, and America. The most important findings are as follows: (a) Although social media analytics is the preferred research technique for marketing in the last decades, it should be supported by more complex research methods such as sentiment analysis. (b) Comparing the green ports, conventional ports have more positive effects on customers in terms of operational activities (c) The social media analytics may help to understand which port services maximize the branding equity.

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