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1. Introduction
Social media started in the 1990s and has been popular since the 2000s (Cao, 2011). It has been widely used by businesses in marketing activities to test their products, maintain relationships and explore their marketing capacity because it is cost-effective and strongly influences like-minded customers’ perceptions (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). For example, social media is important for tourists in acquiring information and requesting for customer service in the form of text, photos and videos (Jacobsen and Munar, 2012).
Facebook is one of the most famous social media platforms with over two billion monthly active users (Facebook, 2017), out of which 42 per cent is located in Asia, 19 per cent in South America, 17.5 per cent in Europe, 13.5 per cent in North America, 8 per cent in Africa and 1 per cent in Oceania and Australia (Internet World Statistics, 2017). Facebook satisfies needs for communication, belongingness and cognition (Wang, 2012). Currently, companies extensively use Facebook to achieve several marketing objectives, such as to increase brand awareness and engagement and to build virtual communities. For example, airline companies use Facebook fan pages (FFPs) to build their own community, where they can share agent-generated content, such as contacts, press releases, emergency issues and news, and user-generated content (e.g. customer comments) (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010). Rather than direct advertisement, an FFP helps to build a bond and interact with fans more closely. Specifically, Turkish Airlines used their FFP to answer enquiries about potential destinations, conduct marketing tests for new routes and gather feedback. AirAsia used their FFP as the main communication tool after the unfortunate plane crash on December 28, 2014 (AirAsia, 2014). Southwest Airlines organised a “Fans Fly Free” sweepstakes to increase engagement on their FFP (Facebook.com, 2010).
Many studies have been conducted on the usage of social media in the tourism industry (Leung et al., 2013; Jacobsen and Munar, 2012). As mentioned in the earlier paragraphs, social media are significant as promotional and customer relationship management tools for airlines. In addition, the airline industry is the second biggest industry, after the telecommunication industry, that uses social media channels (socialbakers.com, 2014). To the authors’ knowledge, only 65 published research papers in SCOPUS, social science citation index and science citation index databases are related...