Comparative Analysis of User-generated and Travel agency photo posting in Chinese Microblog

Abstract

The development of social media has produced many user-generated photographs, and it has also provided a new platform for tourism agencies to use photographs to promote their tourism products. This study aims to compare usergenerated photo postings and the travel agency photo postings collected from Sina microblog, one of the most popular Chinese social media platforms. Study results reveal differences in posted images between Chinese domestic tourist destination users and travel agencies. This study provides practical information for travel agencies to develop their promotion strategies for use on social media.

The impact of photographs on the online marketing for tourism: The case of Japanese-style inns

“…In short, photographs lie between sites and tourists: Photography supports the process in which sites become tangible and personal for tourists and allow tourists to take ownership of what they gaze upon and their individual experience with the sights. Photographs taken by tourists also work as a proof of their visit to a place where they may want to have authentic experience (Zhang and Yun, 2014), or an extraordinary experience (Urry, 1990), and so on. The photographs tourists take also play a significant role when their memories of a destination are integrated into their own stories or narratives (Lo et al, 2011) and will be shared with their family and friends when tourists return to their ordinary environments.…”

“…These photographs are often supported by text information to fascinate their prospective guests. Furthermore, an increasing number of hoteliers, including Japanese-style inns, also utilise social networking and/or video/photo-sharing websites in an attempt to present the best possible image with their photographs for marketing purposes (Liu et al, 2018; Zhang and Yun, 2014). Such active usage of online photographs also applies to guests.…”

The consistency of projected online destination images: comparing the official websites and Instagram accounts of main destinations in Southeast Asia

“…Interestingly, Nugroho (2017), also argued that natural landscape is the main attribute of the destinations promoted by most Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) countries. Similarly, Zhang and Jeong Yun (2014) found natural resources/ geography and culture/heritage/art as the most frequent categories of China's projected image in a microblogging platform. Likewise, culture was also found as the photographic category, with the most appearances out of the six destinations in Asia included in Chinese travel magazines (Hsu and Song, 2014).…”

“…The increasing use of visual materials as a means of promoting destination images has encouraged the use of visual-based content analysis methods in analysing and evaluating the communication process (Zhang and Jeong Yun, 2014). Initially, content analysis was mostly used to analyse texts.…”

“…Previous studies applied this method and further developed (or adapted) different categorisations for analysing visual images on various online platforms such as a DMO’s website and social network site (Mak, 2017; Song and Kim, 2016; Stepchenkova and Zhan, 2013), the official tourism website and private sector websites of a city in China (Lian and Yu, 2017) and a Chinese microblog (Zhang and Jeong Yun, 2014). Therefore, this study applied content analysis to investigate potential differences between websites and Instagram accounts of tourist destinations.…”