Abstract
More and more tourists are becoming active members of social networking sites (SNS) and are tending to use SNS during different trip stages. Thus, SNS use allows their members to find a great variety of tourism information; share experiences by posting various pictures, photos, and blogs; tag photos; and read and leave comments on network friends’ posts. By getting tagged in a friend’s photos or getting some positive comments, the tourists using SNS can perceive social support from both friends and other network members, and obtain positive emotions triggering from maintaining relationships with family members and close friends or sharing opinions and ideas with people with similar interests. All this can change and shape the satisfaction with tourism experience of the tourists. This study aims to fill the gap in understanding the relationship between SNS use and satisfaction with tourism experience by exploring the effect of psychological factors caused by SNS use on tourists’ experience. More specifically, this research attempts to investigate the mediating effects of perceived social support, positive emotions, and commitment. The statistical results show that SNS use positively affect satisfaction with tourism experience by mediating positive emotions and commitment and perceived social support, and commitment also positively influences satisfaction with tourism experience by mediating positive emotions. With these results, this study extends the research stream of tourism experience by figuring out the mediating role of positive emotions caused by SNS use. Additionally, these findings provide some practical implications regarding marketing techniques that use SNS to increase satisfaction with tourism experience of tourists.
Highlights
Social media are considered one of the most rapidly growing communication technologies [1,2,3]
This study proposes an integrated theoretical framework by combining the social influence theory and broad-and-build theory of positive emotions to investigate whether social networking sites (SNS) use can influence satisfaction with tourism experience
Existing literature emphasizes the role of social media and SNS use in the tourism industry in terms of the social presence’s influence on tourism information search, sharing tourism information and/or satisfaction with tourism experience
Summary
Social media are considered one of the most rapidly growing communication technologies [1,2,3]. Social media is represented in a variety of forms such as photo sharing sites (e.g., Flickr), video creation and information sharing sites (e.g., YouTube), online communities, social tagging (e.g., Digg), and newsreaders (e.g., Google Reader), the most popular ones are social networking sites (SNS) (e.g., Facebook) [4,5,6]. Many researchers within information and communication technologies (ICT) and social psychology areas have begun investigating SNS use, focusing on the main reasons that influence SNS acceptance and continuous use [8,10], psychological outcomes of SNS use [4,11], and major indicators of social networking [12,13]
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