Leveraging emojis as visual semiotics for enhanced engagement in destination marketing

Abstract

While emojis serve as a proxy of emotion in digital environments and pave the way for new epistemological viewpoints in destination marketing, certain symbols fail to receive equal attention. This study explores the sentiment of emojis across social media posts featuring different destination characteristics and their impact on engagement. By employing topic modelling and permutation feature importance, the findings revealed 21 topics based on diverse tourism contexts and the relative importance of different emoji types in predicting engagement. Moreover, in addition to bridging semiotics, data science, and tourism, this research also provides a deeper understanding of leveraging visual semiotics through their embedded sentiment.