Factors Associated with Social Media on Consumer Adoption in Tourism (With Special reference to Kandy).

Abstract

With the development of computer and Internet technology, social media have been widely used. During the last decade, an explosion of user-driven web technologies: blogs, social networks and media sharing platforms have been occurred. In the modern world, Social media play an important role in the consumer’s decision-making procedure. The growth of social media has led to new methods of pursuing and gaining information about various products and services in the market. It has facilitated consumers to associate and discuss different service or product providers easily (Chung and Koo, 2015). As tourism is an information-intensive industry it is necessary to understand the fluctuations or the deviations in the technologies that influence on the distribution and approachability of information regarding the travel (Xiang and Gretzel, 2010). Sri Lanka, as one of the countries with high usage of social media, has more than 6.2 million active social media users while in the world its more than 3.48 billion users. Among the most popular social media sites, Facebook gets the first place with 6 million active users, while Instagram has 1.1 million active users and Twitter has 182.5 thousand users for the last year (Hootsuite, 2019). One of the main advantage of social media is that it acts as as an effective communication media in the tourism industry were found by the authors in the literature (Desai and Eric, 2015; Verma, Stock and Mc Carthy (2012): Schu‑ ckert et al, 2015). Through these data it is cleared that social media sites are very popular in the country and it can be used as an effective tool for marketing in the field of tourism, in order to reach very large part of population. On the other hand, Sri Lanka is one of the greatest tourist destinations. The existing literature about social media generally emphases on the features of social media. However, researches about the factors associated with social media on adoption intention in of tourism sector is rare. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the factors related to social media that effect adoption intention in tourism.