Spent 80 Million Won of Tax Money... Only 4,740 SNS Followers [2023 National Audit]

Korea Tourism Organization's Annual 4.1 Billion Won Taxpayer Money
1 in 3 Channels Has Fewer Than 10,000 Followers
Japanese Channel Has Only 289 Followers

The Korea Tourism Organization has been criticized for spending an annual budget of 4.1 billion KRW solely on operating 69 social networking service (SNS) channels. Among these, there were channels with fewer than 5,000 followers?a key measure of SNS channel influence?that still received an annual budget of 80 million KRW.

According to an analysis of the National Assembly audit data submitted by the Korea Tourism Organization to Lee Byung-hoon, a member of the Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee of the Democratic Party of Korea, on the 19th, the number of SNS channels operated by the Korea Tourism Organization reached 69.

By SNS platform, they operate 18 Instagram channels, 14 Facebook channels, 13 YouTube channels, 6 Twitter channels, 2 Naver blogs, and 3 Kakao channels and stories. In addition, they separately operate channels such as China's Weibo and Russia's VKontakte.

Lee pointed out that the reason the Korea Tourism Organization operates so many SNS channels is because each department and branch office runs separate SNS channels, and they are also established and operated differently according to their purposes.

For example, the Overseas Digital Marketing Team operates 17 SNS channels by language group. The Domestic Digital Marketing Team operates 6, the Hallyu Tourism Team 5, the Tourism Welfare and Safety Center 4, the MICE Team 3, and the National Tourism Marketing Team 6. Branch offices, including the Sejong branch, also operate separate Instagram channels.

Among the SNS channels operated by the Korea Tourism Organization, the channel with the most followers is the TikTok Chinese channel with 1,153,803 followers. The channel with the fewest followers is the Facebook Japanese channel with 289 followers.

Out of the 69 channels, 24 had fewer than 10,000 followers. The Tourism Welfare and Safety Center operated a channel with 4,740 followers while spending an annual budget of 80 million KRW. Branches such as the Sejong branch and the Daejeon Chungnam branch spent 22 million KRW in budget but had only 20,787 and 5,292 followers, respectively.

Lee said, "While operating SNS channels, an integrated plan should be established from a mid- to long-term perspective, but channels are being created shortsightedly as needed for immediate promotional purposes, resulting in inefficient and excessive operation of SNS channels." He added, "From the perspective of promotional efficiency, it is necessary to consolidate SNS channels into a single brand and reorganize personnel and budgets."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.