Beyond Reviewing: Uncovering the Multiple Roles of Tourism Social Media Users

Abstract

Existing research on tourism social media users rarely extends beyond their role as appraisers of tourism and hospitality products. Such research fails to identify the different modes of experience and behavior that these users assume in their cyberspace interactions. This article demonstrates that user interactions entail much more than evaluating products. Using data from TripAdvisor, it identifies five additional user roles that define their experience and comportment online: troll, activist, social critic, information seeker, and socialite. Adopting a netnographic approach, these categories are interrogated to provide a more nuanced understanding of the online user experience in tourism social media space. Further, for each role, we glean the implicit uses and gratifications users seek from using the media. It is argued that the combined enactment of these roles creates a rich repository of experiential narratives that tourism businesses and destination managers can tap into for insights into the modern tourism consumer.