Reflections of Destinations on Social Media

Abstract

Competitive environment enhanced the importance of tourist destination marketing recently. Developments in technology such as Internet and social media enable tourists to increase their knowledge about destinations more easily which creates a challenge for destination marketers. Social media has grown rapidly and started to play an increasingly crucial role in destination marketing. This study examines how social media platforms affect the destinations in terms of promotion and marketing in a case of Instagram. In this study the researchers evaluated the Tourism Calgary's official Instagram account followed by 2814 people with 338 posts of photos. The photographs were analyzed according to their contents and were categorized into 13 different themes. As such this study provides opportunities to understand growing importance of social media and the tips to create an effective social media account for practitioners in terms of effective destination marketing to maintain the interest of users.