Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use Twitter analysis to explore diner perceptions of four types of Asian restaurants (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai). Design/methodology/approach Using 86,015 tweets referring to Asian restaurants, this research used text mining and sentiment analysis to find meaningful patterns, popular words and emotional states in opinions. Findings Twitter users held mingled perceptions of different types of Asian restaurants. Sentiment analysis and ANOVA showed that the average sentiment scores for Chinese restaurants was significantly lower than the other three Asian restaurants. While most positive tweets referred to food quality, many negative tweets suggested problems associated with service quality or food culture. Research limitations/implications This research provides a methodology that future researchers can use in applying social media analytics to explore major issues and extract sentiment information from text messages. Originality/value Limited research has been conducted applying social media analysis in hospitality research. This study fills a gap by using social media analytics with Twitter data to examine the Twitter users’ thoughts and emotions for four different types of Asian restaurants.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to develop research theme categories, investigate thematic trends between 1998 and 2013 and present changes in event management research topics. Design/methodology/approach The coding instrument was developed for thematic analysis of 592 articles in four event management research journals and 106 event management articles in top-tier hospitality and tourism management (H&T) journals. Various intercoder reliability indices were calculated to ensure credibility of content analysis. Findings Major domains of research themes were identified across different periods and journals. Themes differed not only between the event management-focused journals and the hospitality and tourism (H&T) journals but also in different periods (1998-2003, 2004-2008 and 2009-2013). Originality/value First, this study analyzed all articles published in journals focusing on event management as well as event management research published in the H&T journals. Second, this paper improved the credibility of thematic analysis by developing a coding instrument of research themes and by reporting intercoder reliability. Third, this research captured changes in popularity of research themes of different periods and distinct research realms (event management journals versus H&T journals).

PurposeThis study assessed the effect of photo themes to facilitate social media user engagement in Facebook brand pages and emphasized the important role of designing images for developing destination marketing strategies.Design/methodology/approachThis study analyzed 8,900 posts that were published by official tourism destination marketers for each destination (Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea). Text mining analysis, image thematic coding analysis and two-way ANOVA were applied to examine the significant differences across proposed determinants for the following engagements: the numbers of likes, comments and shares.FindingsThe results indicated that photographs on social media of three tourism destinations can be explored based on 11 categories of image themes. The themes' significant and distinct effects on three indicators of social media engagement were verified.Originality/valueThis research presented methodological insights by integrating thematic and statistical analyses with social media analytics. The findings of this study provided theoretical evidence of the importance of image themes in the context of social media engagement marketing. Based on the implications of this study, practitioners would enhance the effectiveness of social media marketing.

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