With social media platforms becoming the go-to place for tourists seeking reliable travel information, virtual travel communities on Facebook are offering tourism companies a way to tap into large groups of travellers and promote their tourism products and services to them. While a large amount of research has been conducted to evaluate behaviour and motivations of virtual community members, this research aims to offer insight into how tourism entities can successfully make use of such communities to engage with their target audience.

This qualitative research project focuses on a popular Facebook community, New Zealand Travel Tips (NZTT), and uses virtual ethnography, also known as ‘Netnography’, to uncover the ways in which small and medium sized tourism companies (SMEs) are leveraging the platform to communicate with travellers. Data is collected from the NZTT Facebook group comprising of posts and comments shared by representatives of tourism entities as well as the community’s administrator. Furthermore, semi-structured interviews are conducted with some of the tourism entities that participate in the NZTT community. The data is then analysed using qualitative thematic analysis technique which reveal some of the most common ways SMEs in the tourism industry communicate with travellers via the virtual community.

The data revealed the value of virtual communities for tourism businesses in New Zealand, the reasons why SMEs are proactively entering such communities, and uncovered the different strategies they are using to engage with their audience. The research showed that virtual communities can become a viable alternate channel for online communication and thus hold immense potential for tourism businesses.