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Travel Social Media Involvement: A Proposed Measure

Suzanne Amaro

Paulo Duarte

Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, Portugalsamaro@estgv.pt

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Main Aim of Study

• Propose a measure to examine travellers’ level of involvement with travel social media websites

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Literature Review

• Social Media Websites extremely popular to search for travel information

• Many studies have demonstrated the importance and impact of Social Media on travel decisions (e.g. Fotis et al., 2012; Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Gretzel et al., 2007; O’Conner, 2008; Sparks and Browning, 2011; Vermeulen & Seegers, 2009; Xiang & Greztel, 2010; Yoo & Gretzel, 2012)

• Informational Benefits (Parra-López et al., 2012; Chung &

Buhalis, 2008) and Hedonic Benefits (Chung & Buhalis, 2008; Gretzel et al., 2007, Gretzel & Yoo, 2008; Wang & Fesenmaier, 2004)

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Literature Review

• Some travellers have an active behaviour on social media Websites, while others are not as active.

• There is a huge gap between those who use travel generated content and the number of content creators (Yoo & Gretzel, 2011).

• Differences between Tripadvisor members regarding social media use (Gretzel et al., 2007).

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Literature Review

• Social Media Involvement• Involvement is both a mental state and a

behavioural process (Stone,1984)

• A person’s level of interest, emotional attachment or arousal with social media.

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Interest in Social Media

Social Media Involvement

Perceived Playfulness

Social Media Consumption

Social Media Creation

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Methodolgy

Interest in Social Media

Social Media for travel purposes is….

McQuarrie and Munson (1992)

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Methodolgy

Perceived Playfulness

Adapted from Lee, Cheung and Chen (2005), Moon and Kim (2001) and Verhoef and Langerak (2001)

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Methodolgy

Social Media Consumption

Before travelling….

While travelling….

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Methodolgy

Social Media Creation

While travelling….

After travelling….

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Data Collection

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Instrument Validation

• The reliability and validity of the measures were tested with a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using SmartPLS

• This approach is considered to be more reliable and valid than other approaches (Afthanorhan, 2013).

• PLS-SEM readily incorporates both reflective and formative measures (Hair et al., 2014).

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Reliability and Validity Measures

• Indicator loadings between 0.72 and 0.95 and were found to be significant

• Cronbach’s Alfas between 0.9 and 0.94 (> 0.6)

• Composite Reliabilities 0.93 and 0.95 (> 0.7)

• AVE between 0.68 and 0.82 (>0.5)

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Discriminant Validity

Interest in Social Media

Perceived Playfulness

Social Media Consumption

Social Media Creation

Interest in SM 0.87

Perceived Playfulness

0.54 0.91

Social Media Consumption

0.41 0.78 0.89

Social Media Creation

0.41 0.60 0.56 0.82

Fornell-Larcker criterion

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Discriminant Validity

Interest in

SM PP in SM Social Media Consumption

Social Media Creation

ISM1 0.84 0.48 0.38 0.38 ISM2 0.88 0.47 0.34 0.38 ISM3 0.88 0.49 0.38 0.43 ISM4 0.89 0.48 0.34 0.37 ISM5 0.86 0.43 0.35 0.32 PP1 0.52 0.95 0.76 0.60 PP2 0.53 0.95 0.73 0.60 PP3 0.54 0.93 0.72 0.56 PP4 0.35 0.80 0.61 0.41

SMC1 0.31 0.70 0.90 0.43 SMC2 0.42 0.71 0.90 0.53 SMC3 0.37 0.72 0.95 0.50 SMC4 0.36 0.72 0.95 0.49 SMC5 0.38 0.64 0.77 0.54

SMCR1 0.32 0.45 0.44 0.72 SMCR2 0.33 0.48 0.54 0.75 SMCR3 0.42 0.57 0.46 0.86 SMCR4 0.40 0.53 0.50 0.92 SMCR5 0.26 0.36 0.32 0.77 SMCR6 0.39 0.54 0.47 0.90

PP – Perceived Playfulness; SM – Social Media

Cross-Loadings

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First Order Constructs Weights

Interest in Social Media

Social Media Involvement

Perceived Playfulness

Social Media Consumption

Social Media Creation

0.34***

0.32***

0.29***

0.27***

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Conclusions

• The results empirically show that social media involvement can be conceptualized as a formative construct composed by four distinct dimensions

• Travellers that are more involved are an attractive segment

• Useful for online personalization and segmentation or to predict behaviours

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