Leveraging trends: Investigating the effects of congruence between DPO content and trends on customer engagement on social media

Destination promotion organizations (DPOs) increasingly use time sensitive social media trends to attract attention and stimulate engagement. This study examines how the congruence between DPO content and trending user-generated content shapes online engagement and subsequent visit-related outcomes. We develop a multimodal approach using Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training embeddings to measure the alignment between the textual and visual elements of DPO posts and trending user-generated content. Drawing on a Weibo dataset from 50 Chinese tourism cities, we find that trend-congruent content increases online engagement and activates users’ organismic responses, including cognition, pleasure, and self-congruence. However, engagement convert in to actual visits mainly through self-congruence whereas pleasure has no significant direct effect. The study shows that trend-following is effective when it creates identity-based resonance rather than only short-term attention, and demonstrates a replicable multimodal measure of content-trend congruence in destination marketing research.