Abstract
Organisations are increasingly utilising social media to advertise to, and interact with, consumers. Sponsored advertisements embedded into targeted users’ social media feeds appear less invasive than standalone advertisements but, unlike organic postings, incur financial cost. Given that friends’ posts attract most attention, this research employs Uses and Gratifications theory to determine salient motivations for users’ intentions to share sponsored advertisements, framed in the tourism context. Survey data was collected (n = 487) and analysis revealed altruism, entertainment, socialising, and information seeking to be significant positive drivers of intention to share tourism-related sponsored advertisements on Facebook. Notably, information sharing was found to have a negative effect, while self-expression had no significant effect. In addition, the motivations were not found to significantly differ between males and females. This study contributes to theoretical understanding of users’ intentions to share sponsored advertisements within the social media environment and provides practical recommendations to help tourism marketers maximise reach.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 471–483 |
| Number of pages | 13 |
| Journal | Information Systems Frontiers |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 6 Jan 2018 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Keywords
- Social media
- Sponsored advertisements
- Sharing
- Uses and gratifications
- . Gender differences