Pragmatic communication and social media use in tourism promotion: A study of young people in Padang city

This study investigates how pragmatic communication and psychological engagement intersect in youth-generated tourism discourse on social media in Padang City, Indonesia. In recent years, platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have increasingly become spaces where young users share experiences, construct identities, and indirectly promote local tourist destinations. This research aims to examine how pragmatic strategies and socio-psychological motivations shape youth digital communication in the context of tourism promotion. A blended ethnographic approach was employed, combining online content analysis with field-based observation and interviews. The study analyzed 42 publicly accessible Instagram and TikTok posts related to Pantai Padang and conducted semi-structured interviews with ten young social media users aged 15–22 who were actively involved in digital content production. Data were examined through systematic pragmatic coding focusing on speech acts, deixis, code-switching, and multimodal elements such as captions, emojis, music, and visual imagery. The analysis was complemented by thematic interpretation of psychological motivations underlying content production and sharing. The findings indicate that youth predominantly employ expressive and directive speech acts to construct emotionally resonant tourism narratives rooted in local Minangkabau identity. Linguistic choices, including dialect expressions, symbolic captions, emoticons, and musical elements, function not only as communicative tools but also as markers of cultural belonging and performative identity. Furthermore, motivations such as peer recognition, relational belonging, and imagined audience orientation strongly influence how digital tourism content is produced and circulated. Rather than reflecting digital dependency, youth engagement with social media appears context-sensitive and socially grounded, where online interaction extends existing offline relationships. The study contributes methodologically by integrating pragmatic speech act analysis with psychological interpretation in examining tourism communication on social media. The findings offer insights for developing culturally grounded digital tourism strategies that align with youth communication practices and socio-emotional dynamics.