Analyses of posts to Instagram relating to sightseeing locations

Abstract

Utilization of SNS data has become the focus on attention for considering measures for understanding travellers’ actions, interests, and concerns to promote tourism. In order to investigate the relationship between actual sightseeing locations and postings to SNS, this research conducted a survey on the degree to which there are postings to Instagram which has a growing base of users, relating to tourist spots in Kanazawa City, Ishikawa Prefecture, with the widespread use of photo-posting type SNS. Furthermore, the effects of the day of the week and the weather on posting, a correlation of the number of posts relating to each tourist spot, and the relationship between the number of posts and the number of visitors were analyzed. The main results were as follows: (1) there were 2.3 times the number of weekday posts on holidays, (2) posts relating to cultural tourism resources were not very effected by rainfall, (3) the distances between tourist spots did not affect the number of posts, and (4) the number of posts increased with the number of visitors.