Abstract:

As a result of exponential growth in the popularity of blogging, travel blogs have demonstrated their enormous marketing potential, and have become an increasingly important mechanism for exchanging information among tourists. The present study modeled online social support and perceived value as antecedents of the impacts of influential travel bloggers on their blog members’ travel-related behavioral intentions, and examined the mediating role of sense of virtual community (SOVC) among these relationships. The analysis results herein demonstrate that online social support, perceived value, and SOVC relate significantly to blog members’ behavior intention. Furthermore, the influence of perceived value and SOVC on behavior intention are both respectively significant. With SOVC as a mediating variable, the CI indirect effect of the perceived value on travel intention did not include 0, indicating an indirect relationship between these two variables. Referring to perceived values, the findings indicates that blog members perceive the influential travel blogs as offering epistemic value more than others. These findings have theoretical implications for social media and online interaction related literature, and have critical business implications for customer to customer (C2C) marketers to distinguish themselves within the expanding number of influential travel blogs.

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