Stepping into celebrity adventure shoes: an analysis of Uganda’s domestic tourism trends: case study #Tulambule (let us tour) Instagram and Tweeter handles 2016 - 2018

This paper seeks to examine celebrity following as a driver of domestic tourism in Uganda. The content on #Tulambule (let us tour) Instagram and Twitter pages from 2016 – 2018 shall be collected using API and data scrapping; and analysed using R to establish the multiple linear regression models. Domestic tourism shall be studied as the dependent variable and celebrity tweets and retweets, the frequency and popularity of certain tourist sites and number of tourist posts of the other handle users and followers, as independent variables. The authors will examine the relationships between the role of leisure involvement with celebrities’ mention and destination popularity (measured by destination likes, posts, tweets and retweets on #Tulambule Instagram and Twitter). The paper shall rely on the social influence theory as well as the concept of celebrity fandom to examine the trends of domestic tourism in the country; and the goal is to advance our understanding of how following a celebrity or public figure’s social media page influences domestic destination traffic in the global south.