Description
This research aims at investigating the role of hashtags and emojis to potentiate the engagement established between Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) and their potential tourists on Instagram. In the last years, this social media has become the preferred in DMOs’ marketing strategies to show their destination attributes and influence tourists’ travel intention, due to its visual content potential, its global reach, and its low-cost characteristics (Sheng et al., 2023; Uşaklı et al., 2017). Instagram visual content potentiates the engagement between brands and their followers (Singh, 2020), creating emotional connections among information senders and receivers (Fusté-Forné & Filimon, 2021) The interaction between brands and followers, composed by the followers’ likes and comments to the Instagram visual content is useful to determine the users’ behavioural engagement, and plays an essential role on the customer’s journey, especially in the awareness, consideration, and purchase stages (Sheng et al., 2023). To potentiate it and boost tourists’ travel intentions, DMOs can maximize not only their posted visual content, but also other Instagram features, such us hashtags-geotags to facilitate the geo-localization of destinations (Fatanti and Suyadnya, 2015) and reach a larger audience (Giannoulakis & Tsapatsoulis, 2016), or users’ tags, to improve the quality of the visual content annotations (Bouchakwa et al., 2020)-. On their part, the emojis -symbols or visual language such as human facial expressions, images, animations-, facilitate users’ online information processing and behavioural responses, such as purchase intention or consumer engagement (Zhang et al., 2023). Through a quantitative content analysis, this research examines comparatively Spain’s and France’s National Tourism Organization (NTO) Instagram profiles in the 3 previous months of the 2023 summer (March-June), the first “back to normalcy” summer after the COVID-19 pandemic, without restrictions to travel for international tourists. In the pre-pandemic years, both countries were the most visited worldwide, and by September 2023 they almost had recovered their volume of international visitors compared to 2019 (-1%) (UNWTO, 2023). The results show some coincidences and divergencies in the use of hashtags and emojis to potentiate the engagement with their respective followers and obtained a different response from them. While both countries used widely geotags to locate the destinations’ attributes shown in their Instagram visual content, Spain enhanced more than France users’ tags, since some photographs and videos posted on Spanish NTOs’ profile were provided by its followers. In the case of the emojis, despite they were present in most posts in both countries’ profiles, Spain widely used human face and other symbols, while France hardly used faced emojis (only in 3 posts out of 94). The interaction with their followers also varied: it was higher in Spain’s Instagram profile (4,277 interactions per post-4,212 likes + 65 comments), than in France’s (1,377 interactions per post-1,317 likes + 20 comments), as the engagement rate (Spain=1.03, France= 0.5). Therefore, according to these findings, Spanish NTO maximized better than France the use of hashtags and emojis to potentiate the engagement with their followers, obtaining a better response from its audience. The study of the role of hashtags and emojis to support Instagram visual content and contribute to potentiate the engagement with their followers provides practical insights for DMOs’ marketing strategies on Instagram, to create, maintain or increase relationships with their potential visitors, that may be converted into tourists’ travels to their promoted destinations.
References
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