Fourth International Conference on Tourism and Leisure Studies

Abstract

Social media has made a significant impact on the tourism and hospitality industry as an important source of information. A huge number of social media users and their highly active interaction show that information sharing on social media would exert a significant influence on consumer’s behavior. Therefore, motivation of information sharing on social media has recently been highlighted as a popular research topic in various disciplines including tourism and hospitality management Although festivals are one of the fastest growing areas in the tourism and hospitality industry, and the study of social media has been gained much attention from the tourism and hospitality literature, very few studies have focused on the motivation of sharing information provided by the festival organizer through social media. Thus, the purpose of this research is to explore various factors that affect quality of information, which ultimately have an influence on motivation to share the information produced by event organization in social media. This study is based on the discussion of the two social theories: The Social Cognitive Theory and the Social Capital Theory. This study contributes to the body of knowledge by establishing and empirically testing a comprehensive research model that explains the relationship among social resources between participants and event organizations, and motivation to share information by surveying users following a festival community in social media. Practically, the insights from this study might be applied not only to the event organizations, but also to destinations modifying their social media marketing strategies.