When Texts Meet Emoji: A Multi-Stage Study of Tourism Brands

Are social media posts with emoji more engaging? Guided by the media richness theory, this study explores the relationship between visual (i.e., emoji) and textual content, and how they collectively impact user engagement with peer-to-peer accommodation brands. A three-stage sequential design using naturalist data, including text mining, frequent/rare itemset mining, and one-way ANOVA, was used. This study revealed that the combination of { Travel Tips and Inspiration,[Formula: see text]} and { Interaction and Motivation,[Formula: see text]} tended to result in an increased amount of likes and shares in social media posts. By theoretically revealing and empirically examining the complex relationship between verbal and visual content, this study enriches the theoretical understanding of media richness in tourism brands. Practically, this study provides actionable guidelines for tourism brands to increase user engagement by effectively using visual-verbal content.