Role of Tourism Products to Promote Iran’s Image as a Destination via Social Media

Abstract

This paper examines the role of tourism products for promoting Iran's image as a destination through social media. Instagram is selected for the study due to its popularity and availability in the world and in the country. The study uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to identify the factors that have impact on the destination image and distinguishing the sampling community. The sampling community for qualitative part is a group of tourism experts. For the quantitative part of study, a set of international tourists who visited or willing to visit Iran is used. The study analyzes the situation of the destination image appeared in the Instagram and comes up with suggestions to improve. It shows that tourism products appeared on social media play an important role to attract more tourists to the destination.