Tourism identity in social media: the case of a Chinese historic city, Suzhou

Abstract

The city’s tourism identity has been emphasized in a contemporary tourism planning practice. Many studies on tourism planning and promotion have addressed that the investigation on local identities and tourism potentials in the development of the city’s tourism strategy must go beyond the aspects of geographical space. With emerging social media communication and increasing crowd-sourced data, there is a great potential for engaging social media studies with tourism planning practice in order to reflect visitor’s perceptions and subjective views onto the city’s tourism strategies. This research seeks for a new approach of relating sense of ‘spatial’ place with ‘digitally-presented’ sense of place.