Investigating the Role and Potential Impact of Social Media on Mobility Behavior

Abstract

Social media are considered as a major communications channel for information exchange, opinion statement, social network enabling, decisions influencing and business promotion. New activities can be triggered by web friends and followers, as a mutual trust on choices is developed during peoples’ interactions on social media. Visited places, attended events, bought merchandise that are disseminated on the web turn into possible attractors for others to visit, attend and buy, thus affecting individual’s travel preferences and behavior. The impact of social media in travel/mobility decisions is the main objective of this paper. A digital questionnaire was formulated to investigate the degree of social media usage in terms of type of information searched, reached and shared, time of information and purpose for which the information was created. The final sample size comprised 237 users and was grouped according to gender (women-men) and occupation (students - full-time job). In addition, statistical analysis results that were based on this grouping are included and further described in this paper.