Tourism Australia and Jetstar entered into a $10-million partnership in an attempt to boost the country's visitor arrivals, particularly those from Japan.

To entice more Japanese tourists who have declined in numbers due to the natural calamity that rocked Japan on March 11, the campaign will tap social media such as Facebook, Twitter and other popular social networking sites.

Since the earthquake, the number of Japanese visitors had slipped to 350,000 from a high of 800,000 in 1997. However, in recognition of the new forms of media, Tourism Australia and Jetstar would no longer rely heavily on print advertising but on the Internet.

Tourism Australia has 2 million followers on Facebook, so Andrew McEvoy, managing director of the agency, opted to try a different approach to advertising.

Mr McEvoy said the three-year marketing link with Jetstar makes sense because the budget air carrier was already enjoying a 60 per cent share of the passenger traffic from Japan to Australia, which grew even to 100 per cent when Qantas, Jetstar's mother company, entered into a One World partnership with Japan Airlines.

"We want to bring back Japanese visitors to our country. They're a high spending leisure visitor, a really important visitor for many markets in Australia," Mr McEvoy said in a statement.

The reason behind the shift to social media for advertising is to tap the emerging middle-class market in Japan and Asia, who are mostly tech savvy.

"What's been fascinating out of Japan is we're starting to get into a very different part of the marketplace there - 25 per cent of our customers from the Japanese market who are flying to Australia have never flown internationally before in their life," Jetstar Chief Executive Bruce Buchanan said.

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