Thematic analysis of destination images for social media engagement marketing

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.