A Critical Discourse Analysis of Spain and UAE’s (Dubai) Media Marvels on Social Media Post COVID-19

Social media platforms are widely used for various branding activities in the modern era, including national branding. This study analyzes the Social Media Presence of Brands in Spain and UAE (Dubai). The aim is to study communications to promote both destinations to foreign audiences. Both accounts contain informational, educational, and promotional content about the nation, nature, culture, infrastructure, activities, and events in appears to be tourism attraction and pursuing public admiration. The data in this study are relay of video campaign (discourse) there were messages through words, figures, sounds, melodies, and images to convey a perception about the nation, as a result, create an influence to attract visitors through the communicated messages. This analysis uses Fairclough’s model to analyze the campaigns through the following dimensions: text, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice. The first video campaign was launched by Spain’s official social media platforms and published on June 22, 2020 on YouTube with the title “Top 10 reasons to travel to Spain. Spain Awaits You” (Spain 2020). The video has 5000 views on YouTube (while conducting the research in December 2022). The second video was launched by Visit Dubai’s official social media platforms and published on July 7, 2020 on YouTube with the title “Ready when you are—Visit Dubai” (Visit Dubai 2020). It has since accumulated more than 16,000,000 views (while conducting the research in December 2022). The finding suggests that Dubai needs more improvement to compete with authentic, historic, and romantic Spain in terms of global rank and number of tourists. Both advertisers are selling, and both advertisers are not failing to impress foreigners, however, depending on UAE’s ambition on the global positioning chart and ranks, Spain is managing to trigger tourists’ emotions and attract three times more tourists. This is one way of looking at it, another way is by considering that perhaps the strategy of Dubai is constructed to attract fewer tourists but earn more through providing luxurious services, which could mean that the Emirates is seeking wealthy tourists in particular, not all tourists.