Abstract
Social media platforms provide the public with a forum for interaction and communication with tourism destinations, playing a significant role in the shaping and dissemination of destination images. Similarly, social media plays a vital role in the construction and propagation of online images for higher education institutions. For instance, indicators such as likes, shares, and visits on Weibo can serve as measures of public engagement with university social media. To reveal the triggering rules of social media engagement by projected images of destinations and related factors, this paper builds a Bayesian model using data from posts and interactions on the official Sina Weibo account of a Chinese university from 2018 to 2023. This model simulates to infer the optimal decisions that trigger university social media engagement.