Purpose The COVID-19 pandemic has a massive impact on people’s lives, the wealth of nations, tourism cities, economic and social media. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to challenges and innovations to deal with multiple direct and indirect impacts. This research aims to explore the development of social media research in the tourism city context to highlight emerging research themes, methodological approaches. Design/methodology/approach This study searched and filtered on the Scopus Web and Web of Science to collect databases and applied hybrid methods. The VOSviewer algorithm was used in the paper to generate maps from bibliographic and text data. Furthermore, a polynomial trend line was used to depict the data fluctuations of papers in the relationship between documents and years. Besides, other mathematical and statistical tools to measure the inter-relationships and impacts of social media publications within the tourism city research area, identify valuable insights and determine a framework for social media research trends. Findings The study outcomes expressed the development in social media research trends from 2005 to 2021 in the tourism city context of topics (social media, social networking (online)), methodology (sentiment analysis), publication outputs with most extensive collaborations and some other contents to form a framework of social media research trends in tourism cities. Research limitations/implications Research data is mainly from reviews of articles that may not account for all trends in reality. Practical implications This research is original that will apply to future social media researchers and institutions. Social implications Policy makers could base on the research trends to examine their future tourism development orientation. Originality/value This research assists social media scholars in understanding trends and themes in tourism city contexts that they could apply in their business area. Moreover, there is a desire to comprehend an overview of the related literature of social media science in tourism city contexts. The outcomes showed the limitations of lacking journals and volume of social media research. The results contribute to meaningful insights by having a more holistic understanding of social media through aggregated data sources.