A Comparative Study of City Branding Through Twitter Usage Patterns

摘要

Both Beijing and Washtington DC are capital cities, but Washington DC has outperformed Beijing in promoting itself. Twitter as a new social media, has become the new field of city branding. So this paper attempts to take Beijing and Washington DC as examples to study their city branding performances on the platform of twitter under the theoretical framework by M. Kavaratzis. These two capital cities have their respective official accounts: @Beijingofficial and @washingtondc. The contents of their tweets within a certain period of time and their ways and frequency of interaction with followers are to be analyzed. Results show that although contents are varied in these two accounts, they use similar ways of interaction with their followers. While Washington DC has higher frequency of interaction with its followers, Beijing are already good at city branding strategies, meeting the level of tertiary communication advised by M. Kavaratzis.