Social influence and impact of social media on users’ mobility decisions

Abstract

Social media are deemed influential in making decisions and seeking advice. Due to their explosive growth as critical channels for information, their content can trigger a place visit, a change of transport mode or destination, or plans’ cancellation. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the influence of social media on users’ activity and mobility planning. Responses of 738 participants in a digital survey were used to formulate ordinal regression models. The developed models determine the contribution of users’ demographic characteristics, travel characteristics and social media usage to mobility decisions after using social media as a source of information. These decisions were expressed in two dependent variables; (i) the impact of social media use in activity and mobility planning; (ii) the impact of the proposed transport mode by social media information, on mode choice. Analysis of the results indicated that the models, which considered all the characteristics together, could better predict the two variables.