Purpose: This study assessed the effect of photo themes to facilitate social media user engagement in Facebook brand pages and emphasized the important role of designing images for developing destination marketing strategies.Design/methodology/approach: This study analyzed 8,900 posts that were published by official tourism destination marketers for each destination (Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea). Text mining analysis, image thematic coding analysis and two-way ANOVA were applied to examine the significant differences across proposed determinants for the following engagements: the numbers of likes, comments and shares.Findings: The results indicated that photographs on social media of three tourism destinations can be explored based on 11 categories of image themes. The themes' significant and distinct effects on three indicators of social media engagement were verified.Originality/value: This research presented methodological insights by integrating thematic and statistical analyses with social media analytics. The findings of this study provided theoretical evidence of the importance of image themes in the context of social media engagement marketing. Based on the implications of this study, practitioners would enhance the effectiveness of social media marketing.

This study suggests a research framework for social network analytics and demonstrates the process of integrating data and applying methodologies to understand visitor experiences at a destination. We applied both social media analytics and geographic information system (GIS) analysis to identify major topics and emotional expressions in a social network. A total of 56,418 tweets sent from Disneyland in California was used for analysis. The results identified three hot spots in the park where significantly pleasant tweets were posted. How to apply the research framework is discussed, and suggestions to researchers and marketers are given.

This study examined serial multiple mediation effects to explain how participating in a recurring local sport event evolves into events support, contributes to community attachment, and affects the quality of life of residents who participated in the event. Using a web-based survey, 486 responses from marathon runners living in the hosting community were used for data analysis. Results confirmed the focal relationship between event satisfaction and resident marathon runners’ perception of their quality of life. Further analysis validated the sequential effects of participant satisfaction with the marathon event on supporting the event, developing community attachment, and improving quality of life. The findings suggest that hosting a recurring sport event presents a great opportunity for event organizers to enhance residents’ quality of life. Event organizers should maintain the performance of the recurring event to satisfy event participants and may develop partnerships with various organizations to enhance event participants’ quality of life.

This research note discusses the current issue of assessing accessibility conditions of travel information and service websites for persons with disabilities. This paper examines the web accessibility of 246 tourism-related websites across countries and service sectors by utilizing the criteria of web content accessibility guidelines. The results show that global airline websites and hotel booking websites have a relatively higher number of known inaccessibility problems. In addition, tourism websites are likely to be inaccessible by omitting text alternatives for any non-text content (guideline1.1), adaptable contents (guideline 1.3) or distinguishable presentation (guideline 1.4). This study concluded that the issue in tourism websites remains unresolved and the investigation needs to continue.

This study explored the relationship between post types and linguistic characteristics in marketer-generated content and social media engagement to find the optimized content to enhance social media engagement level. Post data of 23,588 marketer-generated content were collected from 50 states’ destination marketing organization Facebook pages in the United States. The collected data were analyzed by employing social media analytics, linguistic analysis, multivariate analysis of variance, and discriminant analysis. The results showed that there are significant differences in both engagement indicators and linguistic scores among the three post types. Based on research findings, this research not only provided researchers with theoretical implications but also suggested practitioners the most effective content designs for travel destination marketing in Facebook.