Jahn Bertoli

Tourism has developed and is now a source of income for many economies around the world. In view of this phenomenon, studies have emerged into the image that tourists have of tourist destinations. This image is built with the strong influence of information sources, and nowadays, the internet stands out, along with social media and digital photography. With this in mind, this study aims to analyze the representation of the destination image of the city of Blumenau on Instagram, one of the fastest growing social media in Brazil. The research is considered basic, according to its nature; quantitative, according to its approach; and exploratory, in relation to its objectives. The technical procedures used were: literature review, data collection and analysis, which included statistical procedures such as Cronbach’s Alpha, Spearman’s Correlation and Structural Equation Modeling. Data was collected between March 6 and April 18, 2014, using specific software for monitoring social media. 1000 images tagged with the hashtag #Blumenau on Instagram were analyzed.