Abstract:

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.