Author(s)

W. Li

Abstract

User-generated-content (UGC) on social media are considered as reliable form of electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM). The tourism industry is an information-intensive industry. Tourists often share their experience, evaluations and thoughts in the social media. Potential tourists depend on such information to guide their trip. The positive and negative information would further affect tourists’ perception of the destination and destination selection. Considering the importance of UGCs, it is imperative to understand the contents and the themes of UGCs of a particular destination. This research has employed semantic network analysis (SNA) to analyse UGCs in micro-blogs and explore tourists’ attitudes towards the destination. The themes of the contents were explored and a semantic network map was eventually drawn out. The results indicated that the themes of the reviews are diversified. Tourists mostly visited casinos, world heritage sites and enjoyed local foods in Macao. Micro cultural markets also coexist and interact. Destination marketing organizations at all levels should be concerned that e-WOM can foster niche markets to benefit Macao from building a world travel and leisure centre. Further, the renewed spread of e-WOM can make a contribution to the destination image formation.

Keywords

world heritage, semantic network analysis, niche markets, microblogs, destination image formation, e-WOM, UGC