Social media have become important communicative platforms for tourism
marketers but it is not clear if and how the communicative language of marketerto-
consumer is different from consumer-to-consumer. Given the enormous growth
of both tourism and social media in China, this paper focuses on patterns in
language use by the Chinese tourism marketers on Weibo. Using systemic
semiotic approach, it selects and investigates two corpora of communication on
Weibo – tourism to consumer and consumer to consumer. This study expects to
provide the firm understanding and categorize the patterns in the language used
by Chinese social media marketers so that differences to consumer language can
be identified and tourism marketers can learn about language conventions
apparent in these social media.