User-generated place brand equity on Twitter: The dynamics of brand associations in social media

Social media provides a unique opportunity for brand analysis. The mere fact that users create content and messages through social media platforms makes the detailed monitoring of temporal variation in brand images possible. This research analyzes data collected from a specific social media platform, Twitter, about the city of Stockholm over a 3-month period to analyze how social media could be conceptualized as a new venue for place brand meaning formation, and to see how user-generated content pertains to the issue of place brand equity. Using semantic and content analyses, assemblages of place brand-related themes are explored. Subsequently, these assemblages of themes are deconstructed at a conceptual level and then subjected to frequency analysis, revealing an underlying typology based on characteristics of the temporal variation of the various types of brand elements. These results are explored on the basis of both how they apply to the understanding of content on social media in general and how they apply to the online presence, or digital footprint, of place brands. © 2014 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.