Abstract

Empirical studies on the influencing factors of consumers’ online engagement with tourism destinations via social media are needed to help explore ways to arouse cross-border traveling intention through destination management organizations’ (DMOs’) publicity. Previous studies focus more on non-discursive factors which influence the social media communication effects, while systemic scrutiny on discursive factors influencing tourist consumers’ online engagement for DMOs’ social media publicity are really scant. Drawing on SOR theory, the theory of critical multimodal analysis and regression analysis, this paper systematically explores the discursive factors, both textual and pictorial, influencing consumers’ online engagement for cross-border tourism destinations, specifically London. The analysis finds that expressions of positive emotions, visual and affective expressions have significant positive influence on consumers’ online engagement, while most lexical and semantic textual features have negative influence. As an empirical study, this paper contributes to the body of knowledge on the role of discursive factors on tourist consumers’ online engagement for cross-border tourism destinations, and it also helps tourism management organizations to build their social media accounts to attract more cross-border tourists.

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