Social Media in Chinese Tourism Industry -The Use of Weibo by Tourist Sites in China Cand.Soc. in Service Management Master’s thesis Xiao Fei Hand-in date: 17 th March 2016 Supervisor: Professor Can Seng Ooi Number of pages: 62 pages Number of Characters:139,694 Copenhagen Business School 2016 Abstract: The wide spread of social media usage has become an important social phenomenon in recent years. In the tourism industry, the use of social media has shaped the way people travel tremendously. It provides both opportunities and challenges to tourist sites that adopt or intend to adopt social media to their marketing strategies. This report determines in which way tourist sites can use social media, more specifically Weibo (Chinese microblog), as a marketing tool for promotion in China. By using the research methods of content analysis and email interview, the top ten most influential accounts of 5A scenic areas on Weibo are studied. Moreover, this report briefly outlines China’s unique condition of social media and at the same time, explores and evaluates the social media strategies that are used by those top ten tourist site. 2 Table of content: Abstract: ............................................................................................................................... 2 Table of content: .................................................................................................................. 3 Abbreviations: ...................................................................................................................... 5 List of Table: ........................................................................................................................ 5 List of Figures: ..................................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 1 Introduction: ........................................................................................................ 6 1.1 Background: ............................................................................................................... 6 1.1.1 Sina Weibo: .......................................................................................................... 7 1.1.2 Top ten most influential accounts of 5A scenic areas: .......................................... 8 1.2 Research question: ................................................................................................... 10 1.3 Research design: ...................................................................................................... 10 Chapter 2 Methodology:..................................................................................................... 12 2.1 Quantitative content analysis: ................................................................................... 12 2.2 E-mail interviewing: .................................................................................................. 13 2.3 Data collection: ......................................................................................................... 15 2.3.1 Collection of secondary data .............................................................................. 15 2.3.2 Collection of primary data ................................................................................... 15 2.4 Quality of research: .................................................................................................. 18 2.4.1Reliability: ............................................................................................................ 19 2.4.2 Validity ................................................................................................................ 21 Chapter 3: Theoretical background: .................................................................................. 23 3.1 Social media and tourism: ........................................................................................ 23 3.2 ROI in social media: ................................................................................................. 27 3.3 Social media in China: .............................................................................................. 31 Chapter 4: Findings and analysis: ...................................................................................... 36 4.1 Content Analysis: ...................................................................................................... 36 4.1.1 Basic information: ............................................................................................... 36 4.1.2 Accounts’ activities and strategies on Weibo:..................................................... 39 3 4.1.3 Summary: ........................................................................................................... 51 4.2 Interview analysis: .................................................................................................... 53 4.3 Discussion: ............................................................................................................... 57 Chapter 5 Conclusion: ....................................................................................................... 61 Chapter 6 Limitation and further research: ......................................................................... 63 References: ....................................................................................................................... 64 Appendix: ........................................................................................................................... 67 Appendix 1: Top 10’s Homepages on Weibo (data collected by 02.11.2015) ................ 67 Appendix 2: Interview questions (English & Chinese) .................................................... 68 Appendix 3: Interview records (Chinese): ....................................................................... 70 Appendix 4: Top 10 most influential accounts of 5A scenic areas on Weibo May 2015 (original in Chinese) ........................................................................................................... 73 4 Abbreviations: CNNIC: China Internet Network Information Center CNTA: China National Tourism Administration DMO: Destination Marketing Organizations LOC: Location MAU: Monthly Active Users MII: Ministry of information industry UGC: User Generated Content List of Table: Table 1: Top 10 most influential accounts of 5A scenic area on Weibo May 2015 Table 2: Basic Weibo statistics for top 10 most influential accounts of 5A scenic area Table 3: Total number of posts and average number of daily posts in May 2015 Table 4: Source of posts and their proportions on Weibo by May 2015 Table 5: Formats of content and their proportions on Weibo by May 2015 Table 6: Distribution of types of content and their proportion on Weibo by May 2015 Table 7: Numbers of interactive posts and its proportions in total posts (Data collected 10.11.2015) Table 8: Degree of followers’ interaction on Weibo (Data collected 10.11.2015) Table 9: Interview questions List of Figures: Figure 1 Research structure of this report Figure 2 Frequency of daily post by 10 tourist site during May 2015 (Data collected by 10.11.2015) Figure 3 Post numbers of different types of contents 5 Chapter 1 Introduction: 1.1 Background: Following the rapid development of technology and easy access to internet, social media with its attributes of participative, interactive, open and transparent, has changed the communication style for billons of people around the world. In China alone, by December 2015, there are approximately 649 million internet users, including 249 million micro-blog users. The numbers of users of popular social media such as Weibo (microblog in Chinese), WeChat 1 have increased considerably in China since 2009. (CNNIC, 2015; Zhou & Wang, 2014) Social media also has a growing impact on the tourism industry and changes the way tourists travel. More and more tourists, in particularly young people, take advantage of social media for their travel decision-making. They use social platforms to find tourist destination, design travel plans, share their experience and even directly communicate with the tourist sites administrators. (Yang & Wang, 2015) On the other hand, based on the huge amount of users, many organizations and business managements have seen the potential marketing capacity of social media and start to develop their own social media strategies (Zhou & Wang, 2014). Many tourists’ sites and destination organizations are no exception from this trend. They start to use social media as helpful interactive platform to connect with their visitors/ followers like all others. Moreover, Chinese social media are different than its counterparts in other countries. There is strong governmental surveillance on social media platforms and only very few foreign participants in the Chinese market. There would be substantial restrictions in the long run, most of the worldwide popular social media platforms, such as: Facebook, Twitter and Google are banned in China. (Kristensen, 2013) Together with the language barriers, social media in Chinese context is remaining unfamiliar to western world. Consequently, the studies related to Chinese social media is relatively little compared to westerns’. Therefore, this report is trying to explore the usages of popular social media as marketing tool in China, especially for tourists’ sites, their social media strategies in promoting healthy image and maintaining positive relationship with tourists/followers.