Framing agro tourism in Indonesian social media: a qualitative analysis of INSTAGRAM and TikTok content

This study examines how nine official Indonesian agritourism accounts on Instagram and TikTok construct their promotional narratives through qualitative framing analysis. Entman’s (Citation1993) four-element framework was applied to 50 purposively selected posts from accounts representing six regions and three institutional types. The codebook was developed inductively from preliminary data review before systematic coding was applied across all posts. Six frames emerged: Family Experience (48%), Education (34%), Healing and Escapism (32%), Local Product (22%), Adventure (18%), and Conservation (16%). The Family Experience Frame proved dominant across all accounts, irrespective of institutional type or region. Meaningful variation was observed between state-owned enterprise, private, and community-based accounts in both framing strategies and platform-specific content performance. The study introduces the ‘agritourism frame gap’ as a conceptual contribution: the systematic discrepancy between agritourism’s sustainability identity and the communicative choices operators actually make on social media, where green visual aesthetics substitute for explicit environmental claims. This concept differs from greenwashing and greenhushing in that it does not assume intentional deception, but rather identifies a structural pattern of communicative omission that limits sustainability-oriented audiences. Theoretical implications for framing theory in tourism communication and practical guidance for operators, digital marketers, and policymakers are discussed.