Xiaoe Zhu

Social media provide a variety of possibilities for tourist destination selection and bring new opportunities and challenges to the development of Thailand’s tourism industry. This study aims to examine Thailand’s tourism development through the lens of social media users via content analysis and find ways to improve Thailand’s tourism marketing strategies within social media. A dataset consisting of 10,008 tweets was utilized. Grounded theory is conducted to finish the open coding, axis coding, and selective coding process within NVivo 12.0, resulting in nine dimensions: the development of cities, elephant tourism development, Thailand perspective, the development of the tourism industry, tourism story, the development of tourist, tourism for Asian development, travel development perspective and cannabis. Subsequently, word frequency, sentiment, and cluster analyses were performed on those topics. The findings highlighted the critical elements of Thailand’s tourism development in social media, including cities, tourists, industries, stories, animals, and cannabis. In addition, the study identified popular tourist attractions and destinations within Thailand’s tourism development, as well as the positive impact of tourism on the economy, market, and urban development. Concurrently, Twitter users expressed concerns regarding sex tourism, cannabis, medical tourism, ecology, agriculture, and unrest in Thailand.