What Do Customers Share About Eating-Out on Facebook?

Abstract

Discussing the eating-out experience is long-lasting among people around the world, and with the advent of the internet, customers change the way of sharing dining experience online. This study aims to identify the dominant topics and emotional dimensions on Facebook status updates of large-scale individual accounts, as well as the topic variance by users’ age and gender. With an adaption of the myPersonality dataset on Facebook, topic modeling and emotion analysis are conducted. Findings indicate that five primary topics are composed of food, happy time, dining experience, coffee time, and people. Males and females demonstrate a significant difference in the theme of people. Positive emotional dimensions generally show stronger extents than the negative ones. This study is a pioneer of exploring Facebook individual accounts in the hospitality and tourism field and expands industry practitioners’ comprehension of dominant dining-out themes and emotional responses among distinct consumer groups.