Understanding Audience Engagement with Japan Travel Itinerary Videos Across Social Media Platforms

Abstract

Social media plays a central role in shaping destination image and tourist behavior. Beyond providing information
and entertainment, it influences how viewers explore places, plan trips, and share their experiences after visiting destinations.
While some prior studies have examined the role of social media in shaping tourists’ choices, most have focused on individual
social media platforms. Very few studies have compared how engagement differs across social media platforms such as
YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. This study addresses this gap by analyzing engagement on one popular 14 days Japan travel
itinerary video from each platform, specifically YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. After cleaning, filtering, removing non-English
comments and quality checks, the final dataset used for analysis consisted of 525 YouTube comments, 804 TikTok comments,
and 451 Instagram comments. Sentiment analysis was done using RoBERTa and emotional tone was identified using the
DistilRoBERTa-based J-Hartmann emotion model. Hugging Face’s facebook/bart-large-mnli zero-shot model was used to
assign comments to manually defined candidate labels, and final topic grouping was completed through manual mapping.
Results show that YouTube generated predominantly positive sentiment and strong joy-based emotions, with viewers asking
detailed trip-planning and itinerary-related questions and expressing intentions to visit Japan and follow the itinerary. In
contrast, TikTok and Instagram showed largely neutral sentiment, dominated by emojis, tagging friends and family, and
shorter emotional responses. Zero-shot topic analysis further confirmed this difference, showing that YouTube comments
centered on information-seeking, trip planning, and past travel reflections, while TikTok and Instagram were more focused
on short reactions, visual appreciation, destination praise, and social sharing. The findings show that YouTube platform
supports detailed trip planning and engagement, while TikTok and Instagram encourage quick, emotion-based reactions.
These insights can help influencers, destination management organizations (DMOs), and relevant policy makers design
content that both guides travel decisions and inspires interest in destinations.