"Destination branding through social media is crucial to tourists' decision making in the planning stages of travel. Although social media is becoming more important to both destination promotional mix and customer decision making, the social media literature is still emerging, with many gaps in the knowledge base remaining. By conducting experimental design, this study aims to investigate how tourists perceive a destination on social media through electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) focusing on effects of customer reviews and management responses. This study recruited a total of 516 subjects from the Qualtrics online panel database. Four different experimental conditions were randomly assigned to the subjects. After comparing the variance of experimental groups and conducting structural equation modeling using multi-group analysis, the results show that there are different characteristics among experimental conditions. The findings of this study may allow tourism policy makers to make wiser decisions about developing more effective strategies for their destination branding using social media. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed."--Page ii.
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