The Power Of Instagram In Tourism: Visual Content Categories In Small Destinations

The advent of the web and its networked evolution, has brought to an enormous production of data. Different forms of content such as textual, visual and audio-visual can be posted online but tourism is a sector particularly linked to imaging. Photos have several roles in documenting and shaping the tourist’s experience this is why photo-based social media use in tourism is constantly growing. Following this trend, this research would like to adopt an innovative approach in analyzing the photos of small destinations uploaded on Instagram to understand the categories of the different image contents. Content analysis is applied in order to identify photo categories in small destinations, showing that some adjustments must be done to the ones that were previously applied in literature referring to bigger contexts. The objective is to shed light on how to usefully exploit user generated images to provide both an economic and a social contribution to the tourism industry. In fact, destination management organizations can obtain useful insights for better answering to tourists’ needs and wants.

The advent of the web and its evolution have brought to an enormous production of data. Different forms of content such as textual, visual and audio-visual can be posted online but tourism is a sector particularly linked to imaging. Photos have several roles in documenting and shaping the tourist's experience and this is the reason why in the tourism sector photo-based social media use is constantly growing. Following this trend, this research would like to adopt a content analysis to the photos of small destinations uploaded on Instagram, to categorize the different image contents. In the literature this analysis was applied referring to big and famous cities mainly, but since small destinations have different features, more studies about this topic are needed. The objective is to shed light on which contents are uploaded as pictures related to small destinations. A framework for analysing contents can help destination management organizations to obtain useful insights for better answering to tourists' needs and wants and to exploit user generated images to provide both an economic and a social contribution to the tourism industry.