Exploring the Roles of DMO’s Social Media Efforts and Information Richness on Customer Engagement: Empirical Analysis on Facebook Event Pages

Abstract

This study examines how destination marketing organization’s (DMO’s) social media posts and comments increase customer engagement and explores the moderating role of information richness in the smart tourism context. To test the proposed hypotheses, the current study employed social media analytics by analyzing unique panel data from 72 DMOs’ Facebook event pages. The research findings indicate that a DMO’s social media efforts (quantitative aspect) are positively associated with customer engagement and DMOs having a higher level of information richness (qualitative aspect) in their messages have greater customer engagement on DMOs’ Facebook event pages. The current study also sheds light on the scant research stream of measuring DMOs’ social media success empirically and presents the possibility of how social media analytics can be applied to hypothesis testing in tourism research instead of traditional research methods.