This study examines how the interaction between emoji (emotional vs semantic) and social media content (aesthetic experience vs promotion) influences consumer engagement in tourism brands' digital communication. Based on real Twitter data and an online experiment, our results show that, for aesthetic experience content, emotional emoji elicits more consumer engagement than semantic emoji does. Moreover, emotional emoji increases consumer engagement by eliciting a higher level of emotional responses for aesthetic experience content, whereas semantic emoji enhances consumer engagement by generating greater credibility for promotion content. This study contributes to the textual paralanguage literature in tourism by offering theoretical explanations on how and why the matching effects of emoji and content type on consumer engagement occur in tourism brands’ digital communication. This study also provides practical implications for tourism social media marketers on how to increase consumer engagement via the appropriate use of emoji.

本研究探讨了表情符号（情感与语义）和社交媒体内容（审美体验与促销）之间的相互作用如何影响消费者参与旅游品牌的数字通信。基于真实的 Twitter 数据和在线实验，我们的结果表明，对于审美体验内容，情感表情符号比语义表情符号引起更多的消费者参与。此外，情感表情符号通过引发对审美体验内容的更高水平的情感反应来增加消费者参与度，而语义表情符号通过为促销内容产生更大的可信度来增强消费者参与度。本研究通过理论解释表情符号和内容类型对消费者参与度的匹配效应如何以及为何在旅游品牌的数字传播中发生，从而为旅游业的文本副语言文学做出贡献。这项研究还为旅游社交媒体营销人员提供了关于如何通过适当使用表情符号来提高消费者参与度的实际意义。