Social Media as a Destination Marketing Tool for a Sustainable Heritage Festival in Nigeria: A Moderated Mediation Study

Huseyin Arasli,Maryam Abdullahi,Tugrul Gunay

doi:10.3390/su13116191

Abstract

This study explored how social media is used as a destination marketing tool for the sustainability of heritage festival quality in Nigeria, drawing on the theory of planned behavior. The festival, which is an exploration of heritage, was specifically premeditated to celebrate the slave trade period by highlighting the unique connection of African American history to the diaspora ancestors who were literally taken away as slaves through “the point of no return” in Badagry, Nigeria. A structured questionnaire was utilized as a research instrument to gather information aimed at examining the influence of social media (SM), website quality (WQ), and online word of mouth (eWOM) on tourists’ festival satisfaction (FS) and festival revisiting intention (FRI). Data were gathered from samples of 473 diaspora tourists at Badagry Diaspora Festival in Nigeria and analyzed using partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) with the aid of WarpPLS (7.0). The findings of the study revealed that social media (SM), festival quality (FQ), website quality (WQ), and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) had a positive and significant relationship with tourists’ festival satisfaction. Additionally, this study found that festival quality had a positive impact on the intention of the tourists to revisit the Badagry Diaspora Festival because tourist attitude is influenced by the socio-cultural background of tourists. Moreover, the result revealed the partial mediating effect of festival satisfaction in the relationship between (a) SM, (b) FQ, (c) WQ, and (d) eWOM and tourists’ festival satisfaction. Similarly, cultural motivation was also found to mediate the relationship between tourists’ festival satisfaction and festival revisiting intension (RI). Based on the findings, the implications of the festival sustainability and future research directions were discussed.

Highlights

The results indicated that more men were captured, the sample contained a reasonable proportion of both male (54.6%) and female (45.4%) visitors to the festival who participated in the survey
The results shows that the loadings of all the items associated with social media marketing (SM), festival satisfaction (FS), revisiting intention (RI), festival quality (FQ), electronic word of mouth (eWOM), website quality (WQ), and cultural motivation (CM) were greater than the threshold value of 0.5, in addition, the p-values associated with these loadings were found to be statistically significant at less than 1% confidence level
This study examined how social media as a destination marketing tool is used to promote Badagry Diaspora Festival, drawing on the theory of planned behavior (TPB)

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).Information communication technology (ICT) has been one of the most researched areas in tourism technology since the 1980s and has become one of the defining technologies of our time [1]. With the development and application of social media marketing cutting edge strategies in information technologies, tourism organizations can benefit from the numerous opportunities offered by social media to promote their relationship with their customers into a network of marketing innovations [2]. Social media marketing (SMM)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion