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Int. J. Technology Management, Vol. 64, No. 1, 2014 Image-focused social media for a market analysis of
tourism consumption
María Pilar Latorre-Martínez* and Tatiana Iñíguez-Berrozpe Escuela de Turismo Universitaria de Zaragoza, Plaza Ecce Homo, 3, 50003, Zaragoza, Spain E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author Marta Plumed-Lasarte Faculty of Business and Public Management, University of Zaragoza, Plaza Constitución, 1, 22001, Huesca, Spain E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: The power of social media today to promote a tourist destination is
undeniable. Within these social media, and given the importance of audiovisual
language for today's society, those that focus on disseminating images have been extensively developed. Their applicability in mobile devices has contributed to this development. These image-focused social media (Flickr and Instagram mainly) are analysed in this article, as reliable sources to perform a market study of tourism consumption. To this end, and taking the city of Zaragoza (Spain) as a case study using geoposition indicators and hashtags, examples are given on how these social media can provide us with quantitative and qualitative information about tourists that use these applications, and which tourist resources in the city they are most interested in. Keywords: images; photography; social media; tourism; m-tourism; e-tourism;
market study; Flickr; Instagram.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Latorre-Martínez, M.P.,
Iñíguez-Berrozpe, T. and Plumed-Lasarte, M. (2014) ‘Image-focused social
media for a market analysis of tourism consumption', Int. J. Technology Management, Vol. 64, No. 1, pp.17–30. Biographical notes: María Pilar Latorre-Martínez is a Professor in the
Department of Management at the University School of Tourism in Zaragoza.
She is an Industrial Engineer and Doctor in Economics and Managing
Organisations. She is an active researcher and has participated in several international conferences and written many articles in international journals. She has also worked with many private and public sector tourism firms in areas such as strategy management. Tatiana Iñiguez-Berrozpe is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University School of Tourism in Zaragoza. She received her degree in History of Art, her Master's in Tourism Planning and Management and her Doctorate in Sociology, all from the University of Zaragoza. She has participated in Copyright 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. M.P. Latorre-Martínez et al. several international conferences on sociology, education, and tourism, has published articles and book chapters on these areas, and is a research member of a national R&D project granted by the Government of Spain. She also participates as a reviewer in journals related to tourism and is a member of the International Journal of Sociology of Education editorial board. Marta Plumed-Lasarte is a Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Psychology and Sociology in the University of Zaragoza (Spain). She received her degree in Tourism and her Master's in Tourism Planning and Management, both from the University of Zaragoza. She is working on her PhD degree, which concerns territorial image and branding from the residents' perspective, thanks to a research scholarship. She also has participated in several international conferences on tourism and recently won the best paper award sponsored by the Journal of Destination Marketing and Management. 1 Introduction
The current boom of social media in practically all consumption areas and habits is undeniable. The information society has reached its maximum expression with this type of applications, where the premises of multidirectional and online communication that the Web 2.0 is based upon, are totally fulfilled, reaching all kinds of users. If this environment has caused a real revolution in communication between individuals, the effect on consumption has been no less, changing the way potential consumers access information about the different goods and services, as well as the way the companies reach those same consumers. Thus, we can say that the social media have become a junction point and the clearest example of the two names that define today's society: the information society (Bell, 1973) and the consumption society (Baudrillard, 2009). Tourism is one of the priority activities of this consumer society, because a tertiary need, such as leisure, has become practically a primary need for the societies of developed countries (Bourdieu, 2000). Furthermore, tourists no longer just consume tourist services and goods, but they also fundamentally seek the consumption of experiences (Avila and Barrado, 2005), and the further away these experiences are from those of their daily lives, the more value they will place on them (Mannell, 1987). However, and strangely enough, tourists not only strive to enjoy those experiences, but they also want to preserve, accumulate and increasingly share them. And it is precisely with respect to this aspect where the Web 2.0 provides tourists with a series of instruments to do this (websites, blogs, social media, mobile applications). In fact, 96% of the people who travelled in Spain due to tourist motivations in 2010 had consulted the internet previously (Instituto de Estudios Turísticos, 2012), which shapes a new type of traveller: the Tourist 2.0 (Suau, 2012). In this sense, the social media appear once again as an essential application both to preserve and express these experiences through images, comments, etc., and, especially, to share them, not only with family and friends, but also with strangers. In turn, and responding to the multi-directionality in communication that we have referred to above, other users can comment on these publications, share them, score them, tag them and disseminate their own images and comments, creating an emerging network of Image-focused social media for a market analysis of tourism consumption communication and information about the tourist products consumed and the destinations visited. On the other hand, over the last few years, technological development has allowed for this exchange of information to be freer, if you will, thanks to the appearance of different smart mobile devices (Domínguez and Araújo, 2012). If, until very recently, this freedom in communication, made possible by the Web 2.0, was conditional upon the static nature of the personal computer, the popularisation of smart phones, tablets or netbooks has permitted, among other phenomena, the mobility of the tourist 2.0. A consumer of tourist products that no longer just seeks information and contracts trips online, but also shares the experiences of those trips in the social media (Groves and Timothy, 2001). Thus, these media fulfil the need for connectivity, opinion, participation and relationship that this new type of tourist seeks (Domínguez and Araújo, 2012), and the appearance of these new technological supports makes their mobility possible as well as the option of sharing the experiences they enjoy during their trips at the very same moment they are enjoying them (Shoval and Isaacson, 2009). Thus, not just a new type of tourist emerges, but also a new practice within this activity: m-tourism (mobile tourism). One of the basic supports that tourism is based upon is image, both at a consumption level (leaflets, websites, posters) and at a production level (own photographs that the tourist takes on his trips), this image being based on the basic characteristics of the tourist destination. This is what scientific literature has called ‘tourist destination symbol' (Santillán, 2010), that is, visual tourist benchmarks that are disseminated by the public administrations and private entities to attract tourists, and the ones that these, in turn, have as an iconic signifier, which they must "see, check, locate and touch" [Callejo Gallego, (2006), p.196]. With the incorporation of the new mobile technologies into tourist practice, new options have also appeared in this sense (Santillán, 2011). Digital photography integrated into these devices gives tourists the possibility, apart from storing these visual references, of sharing them through the social media, materialising the social representation of a specific space in an image that is disseminated and, in turn, provides feedback, to the collective imagination of a destination. Digital photography and the social media thus become technological mediators in the creation and diffusion of the image of a tourist destination. This fact, among others related to social media, has revolutionised tourist marketing. Tourist destinations and companies use the images on these media as top quality promotional material (Akehurst, 2009), normally referring to the already mentioned collective imagination that exists with respect to a destination and that attracts potential tourists. Precisely the use of social media to promote tourism has been one of the topics that has raised the most interest among the international scientific community engaged in the research of these new technologies in tourism (Boyd, 2008; Miller and Edwards, 2007; Qian and Scott, 2007). However, a specific in-depth analysis of the use of the images reproduced and shared by tourists on the social media, still has not been carried out, with very few exceptions (Lo et al., 2011). Although, it is possible, on normal social media (Facebook, Twitter, Tuenti, Myspace, etc.) to upload and share images, the emergence of social media that are totally focused on images (Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest or OpenPhoto) has contributed to revealing the importance of digital photography as a means of expression and communication, not only among friends and family, but also with ‘geographically dispersed' strangers (Goodman, 2007). In this sense, one of the few studies that has focused on analysing the use made by tourists of online photography has been the study by Lo et al. (2011). In this study, taking this use of image-focused social media by Hong M.P. Latorre-Martínez et al. Kong tourists as a case study, they concluded that 76.1% of the people that post their photographs during their travels do so on Flickr, Instagram or similar, as well as on other media. This shows the current importance of this practice. Another point of interest in this sense is the great influence that images shared on the social media have on the rest of the users as potential visitors to those destinations (Syed-Ahmad et al., 2009a; Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier, 2009), due to the fact that, as reflected by these studies, tourists trust more in the images and opinions of other tourists than in those provided by the actual companies and destinations. Thus then, what could be defined as democratisation of information on destinations through image is developed (Lo et al., 2011). Until now, we have been able to observe that there is a certain tendency in research on tourism to analyse the interaction on social media that goes from the company or destination as transmitters, to the tourist as receiver (basically with promotional reasons); a second line that has recently started to emerge, and with a more theoretic and less empiric development, focuses on tourist-tourist interactions, as we have just seen; and a third that has scarcely been formulated and to which we purport to contribute with this study: the transfer of information between the tourist as transmitter and the company or destination as receivers: the market study through social media, in short. In our case, we have selected image-focused social media given the above-mentioned significance of photographs in the tourist imagination, and due to the fact that these media (especially Flickr and Instagram) provide a series of tools, as we will see later on, that give very valuable quantitative and also qualitative information. Following this latter line, and as an immediate precedent of our study, we have found the research by Ruiz (2011), who, analysing 150,000 photographs posted on Flickr about the province of Malaga, identified the profile and preferences of tourists who visited this territory. This study is plausible thanks to the possibility offered by this image-focused social medium, to analyse the number of photos and photographers by months of the year, country of origin of the photographers, and the most common topics and photographed destinations: hashtags and geolocation. Thus, broadening the view of the previous analysis, this study defends the use of these image-focused social media as a first-hand source to discover the number and type of tourists, the most visited places and frequency, or the months of the year with the greatest tourist influx, through the quantitative and qualitative instruments offered to us by Flickr, or those that Instagram could provide, through external tools, examples of which we will give in this article. Thus, an entire new research line appears where social media can become fundamental sources of knowledge for tourist companies and institutions. To illustrate with examples how the social media can be used as first-hand tools to analyse the tourist demand of the destination, we have taken Instagram and Flickr as references. In Instagram, we have made an exploratory analysis of the available web tools that contain information about images uploaded by tourists through hashtags and geolocation. In Flickr, a descriptive analysis has been carried out, as the actual web application permits including first-hand data without having to use other tools. Image-focused social media for a market analysis of tourism consumption With respect to Instagram, we find a mobile network application that is based solely on sharing images with followers and seeing the photos of the users followed. Since its launch in October 2010, the number of users and uploaded photos has steadily increased, and at the beginning of 2013 there are almost 46,000,000 active users every month, around 9 million every day, according to APPData. Given its popularity, different websites can be found that use hashtags, the geolocation of images, and even the words used in the title of the photo or the users' names to quantify them and even analyse the evolution of a user's activity, a hashtag or geolocation. Thus, in this study we have tried to locate the most complete web tools, developing a descriptive and comparative analysis of them in order to discover the possibilities that they offer any user in connection with the analysis of Instagram and the data that this application may eventually provide. To do this, we have made a search for possible Instagram-related web tools that exist on the internet, analysing, in each one of the cases, the possibilities offered by them to compile information, to later develop a comparison and a description in order to establish an interesting line of both quantitative and qualitative research, which may be useful for different users, companies or entities from the tourist sector. In the case of Flickr, this is an image-focused social media that permits storing, sorting, searching, selling and sharing photographs and videos online. It houses 5 billion images and has 86 million visitors. The hashtags with which users identify the images that they upload to the platform and their geolocation service, permits collecting data depending on what we are interested in analysing. In our study, we have provided examples of the possibilities offered by Flickr as a tool for a tourist market study based on the case of ‘Zaragoza', although this analysis can be applied to any other destination (local, regional or national), resource (a monument or a specific beach) or tourist service (a hotel, a restaurant, etc). To do this we have followed the steps given below: 1 We have registered as users of Flickr. 2 Using the search tool: ‘Zaragoza', the number of tagged photos appears and it permits access to each one of them, providing information about the user that has uploaded them. 3 On the other hand, using the Explore tool, we selected World Map, where we place ‘Zaragoza', and the number of geolocated photos will appear as well as access to each one of them. 4 A dual entry search can be made on the main menu, that is: ‘city name' and ‘tourist spot' (example: ‘Zaragoza' and ‘Plaza del Pilar') with each one of the tourist spots of the city. Thus, it is possible to classify the places with the most geolocated photos of a city. 5 For the information collection process, we created a database where the following information about each user is analysed: user name, origin, gender, camera make, number of photos of the city, no. of photos of a specific place (in our case, the place with the most geolocated photos is the Plaza del Pilar, as we will see below), and the date when the photos were taken. 6 After collecting the data, a statistical-descriptive analysis was performed on them. M.P. Latorre-Martínez et al. It is important to excel the limitations presented by Flickr itself, since the analysis we present depends on the way the photos are tagged. However, we are using a representative sample of the field of study which is the geolocated photos in the Plaza del Pilar. 3 Results
3.1 Instagram As we have mentioned above, we consider that mobile applications such as Instagram offer sufficient possibilities for companies and entities of the sector to use them, in a simple manner, as a tourist analysis tool, given the options that the actual application offers. Thus, we realise, too, that it is not difficult to find different websites that have been created precisely for that purpose. We illustrate this with some examples and their possibilities below. 1 Instamazing • This permits searching for geolocations to see the latest photos located, although it does not provide a total number of photos. • This also permits searching users and hashtags, giving not only the results of the word searched, but also all those that include that word, as well as the number of photographs with each hashtag. 2 Findergram • This permits searching by hashtags, giving the option of showing the images that are being uploaded with them in real-time. The search for hashtags is similar to the previous one, although in this case the results are more limited, as it only shows those that have a larger number of grouped photographs. • In Beta mode, (tests) it has the cities of New York and Buenos Aires, showing on a map all those photos that are located in both cities, although once again it does not give a total number of photos. This resource may be very interesting if they launch the official version with more cities in the future. 3 WorldCam • Search engine for geolocated photos not only in a city but also in specific places of the different cities. For example, in Zaragoza, if we write ‘Pilar' these eight options appear: Plaza de nuestra señora del Pilar, Basílica de nuestra señora del Pilar, Plaza del Pilar, parking plaza del Pilar, Meeting point universal places El Pilar, Oficina de Turismo Plaza del Pilar, Pista de Hielo Plaza del Pilar and Mercado Medieval. If we access any one of them, it gives us the address and shows us the photos that have been uploaded with that geolocation, by which user and when they were uploaded, although it does not give us the total number of geolocated photos in any one of those places, either. Image-focused social media for a market analysis of tourism consumption 4 Webstagram • In this case, the search engine permits not only searching by hashtags, but also by keywords, that is, it finds photos where that word appears in some way or another, either as a hashtag (giving the total number of photos) or simply as part of the user name or of the title of the photo, although it informs that it is in Beta mode. 5 SearchStagram • Beta project of the previous website, with a search engine by keywords and hashtags, where it also suggests related hashtags. 6 Nitrogram • This website focuses on offering Instagram users the possibility of keeping a control of their activity and of their interaction with other users. It generates statistics based on the number of uploaded photos, on the likes and on the number of comments received. • It also offers statistics by hashtag or user, classifying the data by photos, engagement and reach, and it is possible to see the evolution of the previous week, the previous month and the previous year, as well as the total number of each variable. Noteworthy is the fact that as it can take some time to develop the statistics, the website sends you an e-mail notifying you when they are available. • It also gives the option of obtaining a payment account with more possibilities, such as downloading the statistics in csv format. • It also permits searching by keywords, offering the results of the number of users, and existing locations where this word appears in the name, and what they are, as well as with hashtags, but adding the total number of tagged photographs. In the case of locations, once again using the name Zaragoza, the following eight results appear (excluding those that do not refer to the Spanish city): Zaragoza, Spain; Estación de Zaragoza – Delicias Zaragoza, Spain; World Trade Center Zaragoza Zaragoza, Spain; Central de Autobuses de Zaragoza Zaragoza, Spain; Renfe Zaragoza-Madrid Zaragoza, Spain; Aeropuerto de Zaragoza (ZAZ) Zaragoza, Spain; Puerta del Carmen Zaragoza, Spain; and Escuela de Ingeniería y Arquitectura de Zaragoza Zaragoza, Spain. If we select any one of them it shows us the latest photographs uploaded with that location, although it does not offer a total number of photos. Apart from these websites that are gradually appearing on the web, and which, in a simple manner, can give an idea of the information that we are trying to find out, Instagram places its application programming interface (API) at its users' disposal "as a way to make it easier for developers to create innovative ways to browse the ever-growing volume of photos posted to Instagram every second", permitting the creation of new applications or tools that increase the possibilities, and also adapting to the needs according to the objective of the study to be carried out. That is, with computer knowledge, Instagram gives the opportunity to create a personal tool in agreement with the information needs that each person, company or entity has. M.P. Latorre-Martínez et al. Comparative table of Instagram data management web tools Hashtags Locations Search No. total Search No. total for users Instamazing YES YES YES NO YES NO YES NO NO NO NO Cities Webstagram YES YES NO SearchStagram YES YES NO NO YES YES Hashtags 3.2 Flickr In the case of Flickr, we not only find the API at the users' disposal, as occurs with Instagram, but the actual website also provides the possibility of making an analysis of the images of a specific element (for example, a tourist destination), without having to use external tools, as mentioned above. Thus, in this article we have carried out an example of a descriptive analysis of Zaragoza as a tourist destination based on Flickr. No. of photos corresponding to Zaragoza or two hashtags No. of photos Zaragoza 421,244 Zaragoza + El Pilar Zaragoza + Aljafería Zaragoza + Casco Zaragoza + Parque Grande Thus, in Table 2, we can observe the results obtained from photos tagged as ‘Zaragoza' and ‘Zaragoza' + ‘tourist spot'. This showed us that the place with the most tagged photos is the Plaza del Pilar. Of the 421,000 photos of the city of Zaragoza, 259,000 are geolocated. It can also be observed that 30% of the tourists of Aragon are concentrated in Zaragoza, more specifically in places such as the Pilar, the Ebro, the Expo, the Aljaferia, Old Quarter, Puerto Venecia and Parque Grande. The year with the most tourists was 2008 with 88,781 photos of Zaragoza, coinciding with the dates of the International Exposition, held in the city between June and September and which represented a milestone in the arrival of tourists to this destination. The user profile of 4,788 photos out of a total of 7,446 geolocated photos has been analysed in the hottest tourist spot of the city, in this case, ‘the Pilar'. That is, 392 users with 4788 photos of the Pilar, observing the following: • Men represent more than 80% of the users that carry out uploads compared with almost 20% of women, a ratio that decreases in the case of female tourists outside Spain (Figure 1). Image-focused social media for a market analysis of tourism consumption • Spaniards are the main nationality in the majority of tourist areas of Zaragoza. They are followed by Italians and Germans (Figure 2). • At a national level, and by autonomous communities, Catalonia is the community that provides the largest number of tourists, followed by Madrid and Castile Leon (Figure 2) • The dates with the greatest influx of tourists in the Plaza del Pilar are March and April corresponding to Easter Week, July, August and September, which correspond to the summer months, and October thanks to the festivities of the Pilar (Figure 4). • In Figure 5, we can also observe how the percentage of photos of the Pilar progressively increases, experiencing a very significant increase in 2012. The effect of the International Exposition of 2008, which flows over into 2009, is also observed. A chi-square test for independence has been carried out for the rest of the variables analysed and the p-value obtained is higher than 0.05 so for any level of normal significance, the hypothesis of independence between variables is accepted. Figure 1 Percentage distribution by gender of Flickr users analysed
Figure 2 Percentage distribution of tourists by country of origin
M.P. Latorre-Martínez et al. Figure 3 Percentage distribution of tourists by autonomous community
Figure 4 Percentage distribution of tourists by months of the year
Figure 5 Percentage distribution of photos of the Plaza del Pilar by year
Image-focused social media for a market analysis of tourism consumption 4 Discussion
The social media, as well as other sites and web applications have represented a real revolution in tourist communication, progressively managing to replace traditional intermediaries (mainly travel agencies and other holiday retailers) due to the fact that for the consumer this way is more transparent and dynamic than the traditional way (Domínguez and Araújo, 2012). The possibility of sharing experiences about their trips with other users at the same time, as they can consult the opinions of other tourists about destinations and specific tourist products, has revolutionised the idea of organising trips. Proof of this is the interest that this phenomenon has given rise to in numerous studies, such as those that are especially focused on TripAdvisor (Gretzel and Yoo, 2008; Vermeulen and Seegers, 2009; Ye et al., 2009), Web 2.0 of maximum relevance as a source of information and tourist-tourist recommendation. However, despite the fact that photography related to trips as a means of sharing experiences has more and more supporters, and is increasing even more today given the possibilities of dissemination and exchange of social media, very few studies have analysed this phenomenon. The few works found in this sense (Yoo et al., 2009; Syed-Ahmad et al., 2009a; Tussyadiah and Fesenmaier, 2009) have shown that pictures on the web (POW) are considered by tourists as a totally reliable source to choose, organise and plan their holidays, giving the case of Flickr as a paradigmatic example (Cantoni et al., 2009; Syed-Ahmad et al., 2009a). These pictures on websites and social media have a decisive influence on tourists when they choose a specific tourist product, due, as other authors have shown, to the fact that users are more likely to follow the recommendations or criticism of other individuals than those of organisations and/or companies (Cheong and Morrison, 2008). If we bear in mind that on Flickr and in a simple way, the ‘trip' or ‘holidays' hashtags provide around 9 million photographs (Syed-Ahmad et al., 2009a), this and other image-focused social media become extremely important tools to discover the tendencies of a specific tourist product or destination, an instrument which, as defined in this article, can be basic for both public and private organisations to be able to perform market studies either in a general or specific manner. In this sense, platforms such as Flickr or Instagram enable us to discover, in a simple, quick and low-cost way, a series of data which would be difficult or complicated to access using other means. Furthermore, it is a type of tourist market analysis that totally adapts to the type of product we require, from extensive geographical areas (countries, autonomous communities) to smaller areas (towns, historical centres) as well as the entire, diverse sectoral range that makes up the tourist sector (accommodation, restaurants and catering, leisure, services, amenities, etc.) A problem that could accompany the use of these image-focused social media is their reliability as a source of information for a market study. However, through the analysis carried out on Zaragoza in this article, we do find consistency between the data provided (in this case with Flickr) and the tourist reality of the city. An example of this consistency comes from the analysis of tagged and/or geolocated photographs in Zaragoza, from which it can be deduced that, despite the slight recession in 2010, the number of tourists in the city has progressively increased since 2008 (Figure 5). Corroborating these data with official sources, according to the annual report by Zaragoza Tourism corresponding to 2011, it can be seen that the increasing number of foreign tourists to the city has added an interannual 2% since 2009, whilst the number of national visitors remains unchanged. With respect to their origin, Spanish visitors mainly come from the autonomous M.P. Latorre-Martínez et al. communities of Aragon (33%), Catalonia (18%) and Madrid (14%). In the case of foreign tourists, Italians have the greatest presence (25%), followed by French tourists (17%) (Zaragoza Tourism, 2011). Based on these data we can see that, in general terms, the results provided by Flickr regarding the origin of the tourists (Figures 2 and 3) are consistent with official statistics. Continuing with the aforementioned report, and with respect to the reasons why people visit Zaragoza, culture and monuments are the main reasons for the majority of tourists (57%), which will also coincide with the most photographed places according to data analysed in Flickr (Table 2). Therefore, we can consider that, although it is necessary to bear in mind existing exceptions, image-focused social media may represent a reliable means to carry out a market study of a tourist destination, resource or service. On the other hand, with respect to their application possibilities, although in this study we try to show the possibilities that these social media offer as tourist analysis tools, the fact that different tourist entities and/or companies can take advantage of them, too, as promotion tools, is undeniable. One example we can find is the case of the Catalan Tourism Agency (ACT), which, in 2012, called a competition encouraging users of Instagram to upload photographs taken in Catalonia, grouping them with the hashtag #catalunyaexperience. The result was more than 52,000 photographs, of which some winning photographs were selected to take part in an exhibition called ‘Catalunya, seen by Instagramers'. But this is not the first activity that the ACT has developed with this mobile application, as a few months before it had invited the eleven most popular instagramers (from seven different countries) to Catalonia with the objective of attracting the more than half a million followers of their photographs, which they had been uploading throughout their visits, thus becoming the first autonomous community in Spain to use this mobile application as a tourist reclaim. Although the impact of this type of action is difficult to quantify in economic terms, drawing the attention of potential visitors from different countries through a simple and free application is undoubtedly an opportunity to be taken into account, and the fact is that we encounter the ‘word-of-mouth' 2.0 promotion, that is we have gone from the word of mouth (wom) to the word of web (wow), so both the promotion and market research actions must do so as well. 5 Limitations of the study and perspectives for future research
Undoubtedly, the main limitation of the study that we propose in this article coincides with its basic virtue: its clearly innovative nature. The fact of basing the analysis on a phenomenon such as the continuous increase in number of travel pictures shared on the social media as a source to carry out tourist market studies, which have no precedents on a theoretic or academic level, and very few at a practical level, means that practically everything still has to be analysed. This fact reverts directly on the clearly exploratory nature of the article, and on its aim, to make a first approach to the possibilities offered by image-focused social media to study tourism. Thus, we consider that the apparent superficial nature of the article is justified by the fact that, before us, we have a study of a very novel phenomenon, with respect to which, initially, only the aforementioned exploratory analysis can be proposed. This tentative nature has take us to focus on just one tourist point in the city of the case study, Zaragoza, which entails limitations for a complete analysis of tourist consumption or behaviour. Image-focused social media for a market analysis of tourism consumption However, having before us a new departure point to study tourism and the NICTs makes it possible to open up an extremely wide range of future research lines, from the different possibilities offered by these platforms to analyse the tourist market, to the application of the methodology proposed to specific case studies or analysis of tourists patterns in specific places, referring to such different spheres as tourism, hospitality, travel entities, business organisation, marketing or sociology. The multidisplinary nature of the research group presenting this article will permit going deeper into these possibilities in future publications. References
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