From Content to Connection: How Social Media Features Drive PSI and e-WOM on TikTok

Abstract

Tourism organizations increasingly rely on social media to shape destination impressions and influence consumer behavior. However, there is a challenge in how tourism organizations develop social media content to successfully attract consumers’ attention, induce their psychological interaction with the destination, and motivate their E-WOM behavior. This study investigates the direct and indirect effects of three social media content features on consumer behavioral responses, with parasocial interaction (PSI) as a key mediating mechanism. This study adopted the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) to construct content features in social media, and collected research data from 396 Malaysian TikTok users and applied PLS-SEM for model testing. Findings show that information quality significantly predicts both PSI and E-WOM, while source credibility only directly affects E-WOM. Interactivity had no significant impact. These findings extend the ELM framework by highlighting the mediating role of PSI in tourism branding and offer practical guidance for destination brands to optimize content strategies in social media platform.