Promoting Norway in social media in China: Visit Norway’s co-created storytelling on Sina Weibo

Abstract

Social media has changed how tourists obtain information about destinations. Utilizing social media provides both opportunities and challenges for the promotion of destinations. In this Master’s thesis, I explored how the Norwegian national destination management organisation (DMO), Visit Norway, promoted Norway as a tourist destination on one of the most popular Chinese social media platforms, Sina Weibo. The focus of my study was on examining storylines and narratives posted by Visit Norway from 2018-2020 and on how Sina Weibo’s users responded to Visit Norway through comments and likes. My qualitative study was inspired by constructivism. Netnography and thematic analysis were employed as the research methodology of the study and the method of data analysis for examining the narratives of Visit Norway and users on Sina Weibo. Theoretically, this study drew on a conceptual framework consisting of four sociological concepts: storytelling, mobilities, performances and performativities. Through thematic analysis, I identified five themes: celebrity endorsement, impact of films and television series, “Mei” of Norway (“mei” is “美” in Chinese, which means beauty), “Xiang” about Norway (“xiang” is “想” in Chinese, which means expectation/willingness) and longing for “lixiangguo” (“lixiangguo” is “理想国” in Chinese, which means utopia/wonderland). This study demonstrates that stories based on these five themes attract the most attention from users and gain the most responses from Sina Weibo users. The study provides Visit Norway with a better understanding of the growing Chinese tourist market and give better insights into which types of stories capture social media users’ attention.

Keywords: social media, DMOs, storytelling, Chinese social media user.