In an age when social media platforms are increasingly crowded with content, tourism marketers should keep posted picture captions simple, suggests study
Research Corner | A partnership between Macau Business and the Macao University of Tourism (UTM)
New research into the ever-evolving world of social media has shed light on the role played by captions on posted images in driving engagement of platform users. While a picture may be worth “a thousand words”, the study – involving a scholar from the Macao University of Tourism (UTM) – suggests the thought put into words accompanying a posted photo is also vital to ensure the post’s impact.
The study, published earlier this year in the online version of the Journal of Travel Research, was co-authored by Mr Wilson Hong Cheong Hin, a lecturer at UTM, alongside Dr Joanne Yu from City University of Macau and Dr Roman Egger from the University of Salzburg in Austria. Titled “The Art of Post Captions: Readability and User Engagement on Social Media”, the paper explored how the readability of captions can influence the user engagement rates of social media posts in the context of tourism marketing.
The researchers analysed digital content from national tourism boards across several countries, drawn from a dataset of 9,766 posts published on the photo- and video-sharing social media platform Instagram. They examined post captions, the number of likes and comments, the posting account’s ‘follower’ count, and image content. The posts were categorised into 17 distinct clusters, based on their common image themes, such as monuments, food or nature.
According to the authors, the study offered “compelling evidence” of the value of simple captions on social media posts. This, they added, applied not only to online content by official tourism organisations, but also to posts by other tourism businesses, namely those that rely on effective online marketing strategies.
Keep it simple
The findings indicated that posts featuring images of “vibrant” locations or activities, paired with simple, easy-to-read captions, generated a “significantly higher engagement rate” than the average post. User engagement with images of cultural and historical attractions was unaffected even when more complex caption information was provided. However, complex language applied to image posts with non-cultural content often led to a notable drop in engagement.
The study measured readability of post captions on two levels: structural complexity and lexical complexity. The former focuses on sentence-level complexity of the grammatical structure of a language, while the latter refers to the complexity of the vocabulary used in texts. The engagement rate for each post was computed by adding the likes and comments stimulated by a post and dividing it by the given number of followers of the relevant posting account.
The research underscored a key takeaway for marketers: simplicity is paramount in post captions. “It became evident that destination marketers seek to produce textual content that aligns with the intended product image on social media, such as applying sophisticated language to illustrate cultural richness,” the authors wrote. “However, taking into account the advertising effectiveness reflected by user engagement, such efforts may not always pay off.”
They added: “Understanding how readability influences engagement rates is pivotal since higher engagement enhances the likelihood of posts being amplified to a wider audience, thereby increasing exposure for destination management organisations.”
Given the strong competition for users’ attention on social media platforms, marketers were advised in general to simplify the text of captions regardless of the perceived sophistication of the subject matter relating to the particular tourism destination. The study findings indicated that “even slight changes in wording may have an immense impact” on the likelihood of a post being liked and commented on, said the researchers.
– The researchers
Dr Joanne Yu is an assistant professor at City University of Macau. She has a PhD in business and socioeconomic sciences from Modul University Vienna, in Austria. Her research interests centre on digital communication, consumer experience, human-robot interaction, social media data analysis, and emerging technologies in tourism.
Mr Wilson Hong Cheong Hin is a lecturer at the Macao University of Tourism. He holds a master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, in the United Kingdom; Mr Hong is a PhD candidate in applied linguistics at University College London, also in the U.K. He has published academic articles related to language education, applied linguistics, psychology, and tourism. He specialises in eye-tracking experiments.
Dr Roman Egger is an adjunct assistant professor at Modul University Vienna, in Austria. Dr. Egger has two PhDs, respectively in communication sciences and in sociology, both of them from the University of Salzburg, also in Austria. His research interests include eTourism and methodological issues in tourism research.
– The paper
Joanne Yu, Wilson Cheong Hin Hong and Roman Egger: “The Art of Post Captions: Readability and User Engagement on Social Media”, Journal of Travel Research, published online, 2024.
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