Search results

Today, individuals use social media to express their opinions and feelings, which offers a living laboratory to researchers in various fields, such as management, innovation, technology development, environment and marketing. It is therefore necessary to understand how the language used in user-generated content and the emotions conveyed by the content affect responses from other social media users.

In this study, almost 700,000 posts from Twitter (as well as Facebook, Instagram and forums in the appendix) are used to test a conceptual model grounded in signaling theory to explain how the language of user-generated content on social media influences how other users respond to that communication.

Extending developments in linguistics, this study shows that users react negatively to content that uses self-inclusive language. This study also shows how emotional content characteristics moderate this relationship. The additional information provided indicates that while most of the findings are replicated, some results differ across social media platforms, which deserves users' attention.

This article extends research on Internet behavior and social media use by providing insights into how the relationship between self-inclusive language and emotions affects user responses to user-generated content. Furthermore, this study provides actionable guidance for researchers interested in capturing phenomena through the social media landscape.

This paper aims to explore the causal relationship of user-generated content (UGC) on trust in UGC (TUGC), destination image (DI) and tourist visit intention (VI) guided by the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) theory. This work further examined the mediating effect of TUGC and DI between UGC and VI.

Data were collected through online and personal-administered surveys and randomized sampling. This work employed partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed model empirically.

In line with the SOR Theory, this work found UGCs that induce positive emotions and connection to the users motivate VI rather than UGCs that are predominantly factual. Furthermore, UGCs are considered reliable, authentic and less biased than brand-generated content. The findings of this work contribute to the theoretical understanding of UGC to VI in a destination.

This work proposes that destination marketers prioritize UGC that evokes positive emotions and connections with users, as it is more effective in encouraging VI. Strategies such as incentivizing content creators, improving online presence and engaging influencers can maximize UGC. Enhancing online traffic quality, visibility and interaction and implementing content policies are crucial for UGC's effectiveness. Marketers should align destination products with tourists' interests and collaborate with influencers for affiliate marketing to increase tourist-generated UGC. Furthermore, improved connectivity encourages UGCs about the destination.

In tourism marketing, UGC has become a valuable information source for tourists in making informed travel decisions. UGC is a tourist-generated content that offers factual information and authentic experiences through images, videos or text posted through social media platforms. UGC is considered more reputable than travel firms and the mainstream media as an information source. Due to the limited works on UGC in the literature, the influence of UGC on tourists' VIs has remained unexplored at the time of writing. This work bridges this gap by empirically examining the impact of UGC on Gen Z tourists' VI guided by the SOR theory.

The Internet has changed consumer decision-making and influenced business behaviour. User-generated product information is abundant and readily available. This paper argues that user-generated content can be efficiently utilised for business intelligence using data science and develops an approach to demonstrate the methods and benefits of the different techniques.

Using Python Selenium, Beautiful Soup and various text mining approaches in R to access, retrieve and analyse user-generated content, we argue that (1) companies can extract information about the product attributes that matter most to consumers and (2) user-generated reviews enable the use of text mining results in combination with other demographic and statistical information (e.g. ratings) as an efficient input for competitive analysis.

The paper shows that combining different types of data (textual and numerical data) and applying and combining different methods can provide organisations with important business information and improve business performance.

The paper shows that combining different types of data (textual and numerical data) and applying and combining different methods can provide organisations with important business information and improve business performance.

The study makes several contributions to the marketing and management literature, mainly by illustrating the methodological advantages of text mining and accompanying statistical analysis, the different types of distilled information and their use in decision-making.

This paper aims to examine the role of social media communication, tourist satisfaction and destination brand equity components in enhancing destination brand equity based on the Stimulus – Organism – Response (S-O-R) theory.

The conceptual model and research hypotheses were assessed using covariance-based structural equation modeling (SEM). An online survey was used to collect data from 369 domestic tourists who had traveled to Danang and knew about content related to Danang generated by either DMOs or other users on social media.

Except for the effect of DMO-generated social media communication on tourist satisfaction and the impact of destination brand awareness on destination brand loyalty, the findings confirmed the sequential causal relationships between research concepts based on the S-O-R model.

Future research should explore the proposed model based on comparisons of different nationalities to better understand the impact of cultural factors.

DMOs should associate social media with their marketing strategies to enhance destination brand equity, using cutting-edge technologies to create content and update information in a significant way to make communications by DMOs more effective. The findings especially suggest that UGC plays a vital role in improving brand equity dimensions, so DMOs could exploit UGC to engage existing customers and build relationships with potential customers. This research provides guidance for DMOs to improve their brand equity based on social media.

This study has contributed to the destination marketing literature by applying the S-O-R theory to propose a pathway for effectively increasing destination brand equity and highlight the importance of social media communication as a driver to achieve a hierarchical relationship between destination brand equity components and tourist satisfaction from stimulus to organism (e.g. cognition to affect).

Short-form videos have gradually become important marketing tools for tourist destinations. However, chaotic sources and homogenized content have led to poor user experiences. Taking Kulangsu and Xi'an City Wall in China as examples, this study explored the influence of matching short-form video sources with destination types on user engagement and visit intention.

This study selected three short-form videos from different sources for each destination on TikTok and conducted an empirical research using a 3 × 2 experimental design to examine the proposed research model.

The results showed that the matching effect between short-form video sources and destination types will positively affect user engagement and visit intention. (1) the short-form videos with user-generated content (UGC) or professional user-generated content (PUGC) in hedonic destinations can obtain higher user engagement and visit intention; (2) the short-form videos with professionally generated content (PGC) or PUGC in utilitarian destinations can obtain higher user engagement and visit intention and (3) perceived credibility and perceived usefulness played mediating roles in these interactions.

This study considers short-form video sources as antecedent variables influencing user engagement and visit intention and confirms the matching effect between short-form video sources and tourism destination types. The findings will help researchers and marketers better understand the impact of short-form video on destination marketing.

This study examines the research that has been conducted on user-generated advertising content in the social marketing strategies of commercial brands to understand the phenomenon, explore academic interest in the topic and identify areas of limited thematic coverage.

A systematic review of existing scientific literature in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus was carried out using the PRISMA protocol. A co-occurrence matrix was used to review emerging topics on user-generated content (UGC) and influencer marketing, allowing the identification of articles (n = 59) related to the objective of this research.

Most research has analyzed UGC in images or text, but only very few have addressed videos and other digital formats (such as reels, image carousels or podcasts), although there is sufficient work focused on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. There was no evidence of work exploring the effects, repercussions and possible dangers of uncontrolled brand exposure through Unofficial Brand Ambassadors.

The literature review has allowed finding important areas of future research that the scientific community has not sufficiently addressed. Likewise, this work shows structurally several classifications of UGC, which will facilitate future research to deepen and broaden these categories.

The rapid adoption of social media has resulted in a fundamental shift in the way communication and collaboration take place. While social media is recognized as an important marketing communication tool, it has become overlooked how social media marketing activities (user-generated and firm-generated content) influence brand equity creation in the higher education sector. Drawing from social identity theory, this study identifies how higher education institutions develop customer-based brand equity using social media marketing and social brand engagement, taking cross-comparison between high and low subjective norms.

A survey was used to collect data from a sample of 936 undergraduates of private higher education institutions in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. These data were gathered using purposive sampling, and in testing the hypothesis and structure among the variables, structural equation modeling was used to determine the relationship between the study variables.

For the conceptual framework, the authors found that the structural equation model complies with the empirical data. The structural equation model shows that social brand engagement mediates the relationship between user-generated content, firm-generated content and brand equity. Further, the subjective norms were found to moderate the relationship between user-generated content, firm-generated content and social brand engagement, highlighting that the lower the subjective norms the higher the influence on social brand engagement as students receive low pressure and influence from external parties.

The study was conducted at private higher education institutes in Sri Lanka and Vietnam. Future research could benefit from the perceptions of undergraduates in public higher education institutes. Future researchers could widen the diversity of service settings in the sample and replicate this investigation to discover if the results are consistent across the whole services sector.

The current research contributes to the services marketing and branding literature in the higher education context. The paper presents the crucial elements in building brand equity for higher education institutes to fill the existing gaps in higher education branding literature. The findings of the current study provide strategies to improve the higher education sector.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how users on social media view brands with a heritage. Consumers commonly post opinions and accounts of their experiences with brands on social media. Such consumer-generated content may or may not overlap with content desired by brand managers. Drawing from “The medium is the message” paradigm, this study text-mines user narratives on Twitter1 to shed light on the role of social media in shaping public images of brands with heritage through the lens of the stereotype content model.

The study uses a data set of almost 80,000 unique tweets on 12 brands across six categories, compares brands high versus low in heritage and combines dictionary-based content analysis with sentiment analysis.

The results indicate that both user-generated content and sentiment are significantly more positive for brands low rather than high in heritage. Regarding warmth, consumers use significantly more positive words on sociability and fewer negative words on morality for brands low rather than high in heritage. Regarding competence, tweets include more positive words on assertiveness and ability for low-heritage brands. Finally, overall sentiment is more positive for brands low rather than high in heritage.

Important from co-creation and integrated marketing communication perspectives, the findings provide brand managers with actionable insights on how to more effectively use social media.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to examine user-generated content in a brand heritage context. It demonstrates that heritage brands, with their longevity and strong links to the past, need to be aware of how contemporary social media can detract from their image.

This study aims to investigate the influence of the reviewed establishment’s price level and the user’s social network size and reputation status on consumers’ tendency to post more visual imagery content. Furthermore, it explores the moderating effects of user experiences and geographic distance on these dynamics.

This study adopts a multi-method approach to explore both the determinants behind the sharing of user-generated photos in online reviews and their internal mechanisms. Using a comprehensive secondary data set from Yelp.com, the authors focused on restaurant reviews from a prominent tourist destination to construct econometric models incorporating time-fixed effects. To enhance the robustness of the authors’ findings, the authors complemented the big data analysis with a series of controlled experiments.

The reviewed establishments price level and the users reputation status and social network size incite corresponding motivations conspicuous display “reputation seeking” and social approval motivating users to incorporate more images in reviews. “User experiences can amplify the influence of these factors on image sharing.” An increase in the users geographical distance lessens the impact of the price level on image sharing, but it heightens the influence of the users reputation and social network size on the number of shared images.

As a result of this study, high-end establishments can increase their online visibility by leveraging user-generated visual content. A structured rewards program could significantly boost engagement by incentivizing photo sharing, particularly among users with elite status and extensive social networks. Additionally, online review platforms can enhance users’ experiences and foster more dynamic interactions by developing personalized features that encourage visual content production.

This research, anchored in trait activation theory, offers an innovative examination of the determinants of photo-posting behavior in online reviews by enriching the understanding of how the intricate interplay between users’ characteristics and situational cues can shape online review practices.

User-generated content (UGC) refers to semantic and behavioral traces created by users on various social media platforms. While several waves of platforms have come and gone, the long-term sustainability of UGC activities has become a critical question that bears significance for theoretical understanding and social media practices.

Based on a large and lengthy dataset of both blogging and microblogging activities of the same set of users, a multistate survival analysis was applied to explore the patterns of users' staying, switching and multiplatforming behaviors, as well as the underlying driving factors.

UGC activities are generally unsustainable in the long run, and natural attrition is the primary reason, rather than competitive switching to new platforms. The availability of leisure time, expected gratification and previous experiences drive users' sustainability.

The authors adopted actual behavioral data from two generations of platforms instead of survey data on users' switching intentions. Four types of users are defined: loyal, switcher, multiplatformer and dropout. As measured by the transitions among the four states, the different sustainability behaviors are thereby studied via an integrated framework. These two originalities bridge gaps in the literature and offer new insights into exploring user sustainability in social media.