The Use of FIFA 2022 World Cup as a Nation Branding Tool: Social Media and Sentiment

This research aims to analyze and shed light on the effectiveness of Qatar’s nation branding with specific reference to the FIFA 2022 World Cup. Therefore, this paper measures and examines to what extent the use of the FIFA 2022 World Cup, thus far, has been a successful nation branding tool. Additionally, it analyses how mega-events such as the FIFA 2022 World Cup can be used as powerful tools for nation branding emerging countries such as Qatar. It is hypothesized that, for a small nation such as Qatar, social media is an important and effective medium for branding and thus promote the country quickly. In order to achieve the above aims, a corpus of tweets from the hashtags (2022#الوعد) (#promise2022) (#Qatar2022) (قطر2022#) (#seeyou2022) was collected using Twitter as a social media case study. Two different analysis tools were selected to collect and analyze the tweets: Orange Data Mining and Topic Modelling. It was concluded that Qatar, through its nation branding strategy and use of social media as a mediator, is taking successful strides towards gaining prominence as a dynamic, forward-looking sovereign state. In addition, successful nation branding plays a role in promoting the country, enhancing identity and social structure, and developing cultural infrastructure to showcase the country internationally and thus strengthening its influence in the world.