barriers affecting social media adoption in finnish tourism businesses

ENTER 2014 Research Track Slide Number 1

Barriers affecting social media adoption in Finnish tourism

businesses Juho Pesonen, Jenni Mikkonen, Marika Makkonen

and Antti Honkanen

Centre for Tourism StudiesUniversity of eastern Finland, Savonlinna, Finland


Agenda• Introduction

– Previous research

• Research questions

• Data and methods

• Results

• Conclusions and further research


Introduction• Social media as a „mega trend“ affecting

the tourism system (travellers, companies, reseachers)

• For tourism businesses social media offer new opportunities but at the same time big challenges

• Still there exist companies that neglect social media in their business operations as well as research about them


• Previous research:– focused mainly on succesful adoption of ICTs,

and rarely on cases where the failure of technology adoption is studied (why companies choose not to use a technology)

– Adoption models i.e. TAM, TAM2, TAM3 (Venkatesh & Bala 2008): factors affecting the adoption

– Goode (2005) studied why firms do not adopt open source software and classified reasons for not adopting

– Diffusion of innovations (Rogers 2003)


Research questions• Why tourism companies in eastern Finland do not use social

media?• What are the main reasons for not using?• What kind of support (if any) they need in order to start using

social media?

Social media was defined as interactive, many to many communication environment such as Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor etc.


Data and methods• 22 SMEs were interviewed about their use of

social media and/or reasons for not using 9 barriers came up

• Based on the results an online-questionnaire was structured and the most common reasons were presented in 5-point Likert-scale

• 900 e-mail addresses (during January – July 2013) -> 235 responses, 87 companies not using social media (37 %)

• Mostly small accomodation companies


1. Not enough skills to implement social media2. Company does not know how to best utilize social media

in business3. Company can do well without social media.4. Not enough time to use social media5. Company feels like it does not gain any benefits from

using social media6. Social media is a risk for information security7. Not enough (monetary) resources8. Fear for critique or negative feedback9. Bad experiences of social media


• Data analysis was done in two parts: 1) respondents were clustered using hierarchical cluster analysis with Ward’s

method -> three clusters2) differences between barriers to social

media use and company attributes were examined using cross-tabulations and chi-square tests


Results

Cluster 1 ”No resources" (N=38)

Cluster 2 “Concerns” (N=37)

Cluster 3 ”No need” (N=12)

Total

Mean S.D Mean S.D. Mean S.D. Mean

Company feels like it does not gain any benefits from using social media

2.11 1.134 3.3 1.244 3.42 1.311 2.79

Not enough time to use social media 3.39 1.386 3.14 1.159 2.42 1.564 3.15

Not enough (monetary) resources 2.87 1.436 2.51 1.121 1.42 0.515 2.52

Not enough skills to implement social media 3.87 1.07 3.86 0.948 1.33 0.492 3.52

It is unknown for the company how to best utilize social media in business

3.50 1.247 3.7 1.051 1.67 0.888 3.33

Fear for critique or negative feedback 1.63 0.786 3.08 1.233 2.17 1.586 2.32

Social media is a risk for information security 2.18 1.062 3.43 1.015 1.92 1.24 2.68

Bad experiences of social media 1.18 0.512 2.62 1.187 1.67 1.231 1.86

Company can do well without social media. 2.71 1.313 3.49 0.989 3.58 1.505 3.16

- Three business clusters based on barriers to adopt social media


Results• Comparison of business clusters

No resources Concerns No need χ 2 Sig.

Tourism is the main business 10.108 p=0.006Yes (N=68) 28 (41.2%) 34 (50.0%) 6 (8.8%) No (N=19) 10 (52.6%) 3 (15.8%) 6 (31.6%) Number of employees 1.071 p=0.8990-1 (N=39) 18 (46.2%) 16 (41.0%) 5 (12.8%) 2-5 (N=40) 18 (45.0%) 16 (40.0%) 6 (15.0%) At least 6 (N=3) 1 (33.3%) 2 (66.7%) 0 Age of the company 3.022 p=0.5540-10 years old (N=22) 11 (50.0%) 8 (36.4%) 3 (13.6%) 11-20 (N=29) 9 (31.0%) 16 (55.2%) 4 (13.8%) At least 21 years old (N=32) 16 (50.0%) 12 (37.5%) 4 (12.5%) Company co-operate with a DMO 5.482 p=0.065Yes (N=63) 25 (39.7%) 31 (49.2%) 7 (11.1%) No (N=23) 13 (56.5%) 5 (21.7%) 5 (21.7%)


Conclusions and further research• Differences and different needs of three clusters,

and understand the reasons behind them• Need for this kind of research, extends the

knowledge of barriers for technology use• Main limitation is the sample size, number of

firms not using social media shrinking all the time• Comparison between companies that have

adopted social media and those that have not


Thank you!

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