Designing a Model for the Implementation of Social Media in the National Branding of the Islamic Republic of Iran: A Religious Tourism Perspective

National branding is a form of national consciousness mainly highlighted in the twenty-first century. The production and reproduction of the national identity could be pursued more comprehensively, relying on specialized techniques and tools such as social media.
This article identifies and describes the major factors in implementing social media for the branding of the Islamic Republic of Iran from a religious tourism point of view. After eliciting the ideas of the experts and specialists of the field in various related organizations, generalizing the Anholt national branding model to the national branding in social media, and introducing the decuple factors concerning the content in social media, a model was introduced and a questionnaire was designed to test it. After the reliability and validity tests, the questionnaire was distributed among 600 samples. In the final stage, of the 600 responses gathered, 384 cases were analyzed to test the hypothesis of the study via the inferential statistical tests of Fisher and Karl Pearson χ2. The analysis of findings verifies ten factors of accessibility, practicability, professionalism, inspiration, instructiveness, motivation and competitiveness, adjustability, clarity, popularity, and sociability.
Providing the circumstances for the implementation of communication technologies for training and retraining of media knowledge with the purpose of employing social media in national branding, both inside and outside of the country, could pave the way for the proper status that religious tourism in the Islamic Republic deserves.