Parasocial interaction on tourism companies’ social media sites: antecedents and consequences

ABSTRACT

Tourism companies have been actively using social media to engage customers, enhance company–customer relationships, and boost business. Researchers are keen to uncover the mechanism by which social media might influence brand identification and customer citizenship behaviour, and factors that might moderate this process. The current study examined the antecedents and consequences of customers’ parasocial interactions with tourism companies’ social media spokespersons. Results of a questionnaire survey suggested that perceived similarity and value congruence between customers and the social media spokesperson induced more parasocial interaction, which in turn increased brand identification and customer citizenship behaviour. In addition, the effect of parasocial interaction on brand identification was stronger in the context of high spokesperson-brand congruence. Implications for improving social media marketing are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Parasocial interaction
• social media
• similarity-attraction
• tourism
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Guangdong Natural Science Foundation [Grant number 2017A030310480].