Effect of Customer Characteristics, Content Characteristics and Source Credibility on Customer Response: Developing A Conceptual Model for The Tourism Industry

Social media has brought about a huge transformation in the way people interact, share information and socialize. This changing trend has created opportunities for organisations to divert their marketing spending on social media platforms, as this enables a more direct interaction and engaging relationship with customers. This paper presents a review of literature pertaining to the factors that impact the creation and usage of user generated content (UGC) on a social media-based travel community. The study proposes a conceptual model that will help researchers in exploring a traveller's perspective about UGC, in making well informed choices pertaining to destinations, hotels, etc. The study further focuses on customer characteristics, source credibility and content credibility as antecedents of customers' response (information usage and information sharing) while considering the user generated content on a travel community on social media, treating customer engagement as a mediating variable. The paper suggests how the travel and tourism industry can use social mediabased communities as a medium of information sharing and getting feedback to strategically position their service offerings in a competitive industry. This research will further help both academicians and marketers to better understand, analyse and explain customers' responses on a social media-based travel community and will suggest avenues for future research