Social Media (SM) provide undoubted opportunities for fostering firms’ relationships with their customers, and online customer engagement (CE) has become a widespread objective when developing communication strategies for firms operating in business where customer references, word-of-mouth (WoM) and feedbacks are predictors of success, such as in the case of travel and tourism business. In this perspective, the cruise industry constitutes a valuable field for empirical investigation related to online CE, due to its intrinsic characteristics.
PortEconomics members Giovanni Satta and Francesco Parola investigated the antecedents of online CE in the cruise industry by addressing the posting activities of some leading cruise lines on their Facebook corporate pages. In particular, along with the co-authors Nicoletta Buratti, Luca Persico, Roberto Viviani (University of Genoa, Italy), scrutinised how post content, format and timing do affect online CE, modelled as liking, commenting and sharing. The authors tested the proposed model grounding on an empirical investigation, which include 982 Facebook posts uploaded by MSC Crociere, Costa Crociere and Royal Caribbean Cruises in a period of 12 months
The study has been presented in the International Association of Maritime Economists 2018 Conference (IAME2018) held 11-14 September, Mombasa, Kenya. Paper and presentation can be downloaded via PortEconomics.
