Destination promotion organizations (DPOs) increasingly use time sensitive social media trends to attract attention and stimulate engagement. This study examines how the congruence between DPO content and trending user-generated content shapes online engagement and subsequent visit-related outcomes. We develop a multimodal approach using Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training embeddings to measure the alignment between the textual and visual elements of DPO posts and trending user-generated content. Drawing on a Weibo dataset from 50 Chinese tourism cities, we find that trend-congruent content increases online engagement and activates users’ organismic responses, including cognition, pleasure, and self-congruence. However, engagement convert in to actual visits mainly through self-congruence whereas pleasure has no significant direct effect. The study shows that trend-following is effective when it creates identity-based resonance rather than only short-term attention, and demonstrates a replicable multimodal measure of content-trend congruence in destination marketing research.
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