Redes sociales en Internet en el marco del turismo cultural: los museos en Bahía Blanca (Argentina)

Abstract

Nowadays, new motivations and tourists demands together with the international economic situation, commit the territories to search for new tourism products to consolidate the destinations. Among these new proposals, cultural tourism emerges with strength and museums tourism is a good alternative. In this context, the main objective of this work is to analyze the existence of structural social capital generated around the museums located in the city of Bahia Blanca (province of Buenos Aires, Argentina). The study analyses the social networking site Facebook specially. Social capital’s influence in the number of visitors that museums annually receive is also analysed. The paper carries out a brief conceptualization of cultural tourism and museums as dynamic elements of the territories. The study of structural social capital is made using the technique of social networks analysis (ARS) with the NODEXL program that allows identifying the structural characteristics of actors’ networks. Findings allow checking the hypothesis that a higher structural social capital is directly related to the annual number of visitors the museums receive.