Emojis in Online Travel Reviews and Their Impact on Tourists’ Perceived Usefulness: The Case of Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok)

Abstract

Online travel reviews have become important information for tourists to choose their travel destinations, and the use of emojis as online expressions has also become a popular phenomenon. Based on the path of perceived usefulness to emojis in online travel reviews, this study explored the difference of impact on the perceived usefulness of reviews through questionnaires on the Douyin platform (the Chinese version of TikTok) and tested the mediating effect of perceived authenticity on them. The results indicate that visual attraction, content presentation, and information interpretation emoticons in comments can affect tourists’ perceived authenticity and usefulness of comments. This study enriches the research on emojis in online travel reviews, providing a reference for tourism companies to manage its reviews, choosing the useful comments, and enabling tourists to reduce information overload and obtain effective reviews faster when reading reviews.