TY - JOUR AU - Ge, Jing PY - 2019/11/22 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Social media-based visual humour use in tourism marketing: a semiotic perspective JF - The European Journal of Humour Research JA - EJHR VL - 7 IS - 3 SE - Articles DO - 10.7592/EJHR2019.7.3.ge UR - https://europeanjournalofhumour.org/ejhr/article/view/355 SP - 6-25 AB - <p>Tourism firms using visual social media marketing are struggling with its implementation, specifically in formulating engagement-based visual message strategies. Yet, creating such appealing posts can lead to positive brand and financial outcomes. Humour has been identified as a potent tool for social media communication, given its capability to develop social interactions. Yet, how humour works on social media is not well understood – specifically its visual form. Treating humour as a symbolic resource, this study adopted a compound content analysis-semiotic analysis to identify visual content and its symbolic meaning embedded in destination marketing organization (DMO)’s social media posts. 200 Sina Weibo posts containing humour images initiated by 5 Chinese provincial DMOs were collected. The results show 6 types of humour content and6 types of symbolic meaning – none of which are product-related. This study advances the tourism literature and humour theory, and offers tourism firms a holistic view of how to fully leverage social media-based visual humour to achieve consumer reach and engagement.</p> ER -