Social influence and impact of social media on users’ mobility decisions

Eftihia Nathanail,Maria Karatsoli

doi:10.14254/jsdtl.2021.6-1.3

Eftihia Nathanail, Maria Karatsoli

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.14254/jsdtl.2021.6-1.3

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Abstract

Social media are deemed influential in making decisions and seeking advice. Due to their explosive growth as critical channels for information, their content can trigger a place visit, a change of transport mode or destination, or plans’ cancellation. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the influence of social media on users’ activity and mobility planning. Responses of 738 participants in a digital survey were used to formulate ordinal regression models. The developed models determine the contribution of users’ demographic characteristics, travel characteristics and social media usage to mobility decisions after using social media as a source of information. These decisions were expressed in two dependent variables; (i) the impact of social media use in activity and mobility planning; (ii) the impact of the proposed transport mode by social media information, on mode choice. Analysis of the results indicated that the models, which considered all the characteristics together, could better predict the two variables.

Highlights

IntroductionSocial interaction and imitation have an impact on peoples’ decision behavior
Social influence exists widely in an individual’s behavior
The four models were developed to explore the relationship among the impact of the proposed transport mode based on information provided by social media (IPTM) on users’ final decision and the i) demographic characteristics ii) travel characteristics iii) social media usage

Summary

Introduction

Social interaction and imitation have an impact on peoples’ decision behavior. Disciplines such as sociology, psychology and economics have analyzed extensively the social influence (Axsen & Kurani, 2012; Axsen & Kurani, 2014). Travel and traffic associated behaviors are affected by social influence factors (Zhang et al, 2019). Social media began their operation as basic platforms where people could share posts, videos and photos with their web friends and broaden their social connections. Social media have undergone a growth that led to a high impact on users’ final decisions regarding an activity, mobility or products’ purchase (Yamagishi, et al, 2016).

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