Social Media-Based Visual Strategies in Tourism Marketing

Social media-based visual strategies are quintessential elements of tourism and social media marketing; yet, very little is known about how firms formulate and implement such strategies in a technologically advanced and consumer-driven communication context. Drawing on rhetorical structure theory, and marketing, tourism and social media marketing literature, this research examines and dissects the structure of social media-based visual strategies implemented by tourism marketers. 250 Weibo posts initiated by 5 Chinese provincial destination marketing organizations were collected and analyzed. The results show a diversity of social media-afforded visual modalities, a variety of visual content and marketing goals, and different rhetorical relations between visuals and their accompanying text. This research advances social media marketing and tourism literature by exploring essential structural aspects of social media-based visual rhetoric and offers firms a holistic overview of possible visual strategies.