Auditing the Marketing and Social Media Communication of Natural Protected Areas. How Marketing Can Contribute to the Sustainability of Tourism Luque Martínez, Teodoro Faraoni, Nina Doña Toledo, Luis Natural protected areas Marketing management Social networks National parks and reserves Sustainable tourism IPA matrix Natural Protected Areas face the challenge of conciliating attractions with satisfaction of their different stakeholders without compromising their own resources. Marketing can play an important role to this challenge from a macromarketing perspective. No studies are found in the literature on the integral assessment of marketing practices in Natural Protected Areas. For the first time, it proposes a marketing audit in Natural Protected Areas to fill that gap applying the Importance-Performance Analysis matrix, useful in strategic decisions, through interviews with directors of Natural Protected Areas. The main strengths, weaknesses, and deficits in the application of marketing are identified. The presence of a restricted and biased attitude towards marketing was noted among directors. In addition, the marketing behaviour is studied in two of the main social networks (Twitter/Facebook), comparisons were established in the USA, Spain, Italy and Mexico, identifying behavioural profiles in five groups in accordance with the 26 indicators under analysis. 2020-04-22T11:44:07Z 2020-04-22T11:44:07Z 2019-07-24 journal article Luque-Martínez, T., Faraoni, N., & Doña-Toledo, L. (2019). Auditing the Marketing and Social Media Communication of Natural Protected Areas. How Marketing Can Contribute to the Sustainability of Tourism. Sustainability, 11(15), 4014. http://hdl.handle.net/10481/61481 10.3390/su11154014 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ open access Atribución 3.0 España MDPI