Social media: Credibility, popularity and its benefits towards events’ awareness - Theory and Practice in Hospitality and Tourism Research - page 320

marketing and the public awareness of the event
is (0.252). Thus, it shows that there is a relation-
ship between the popularity of social media and
its influence to the public awareness towards the
event. However, the relationship was a weak but a
definite relationship (Salkind, 2012).

event by just clicking and sharing the info faster—in
social media like Facebook and Twitter rather than
using conventional tools of communication such
as letter. This medium helped the organizer to effi-
ciently spreading the information and assists them
in controlling the total cost of the event.
By referring to Pearson Correlation in Table 3,
result showed that the mean recorded is 0.252
which showed that the partial positive relationship
exists between popularity of social media and pub-
lic awareness towards the event. In line with that
result, it is widely accepted that majorities of peo-
ple around the world own a cell phone with easy
internet access and mankind now see social media
as a more trustworthy source of information about
any kind of products and services. Social network-
ing is ranked as the most popular content category
for worldwide engagement. Literally meaning that
one in every five minutes, people spent on social
networking sites globally. It's not just young peo-
ple using social networking anymore, it's everyone.
Mobile devices are fueling the social addiction and
they represent the future of social networking from
a technology point of view. With that, it could be
said that the result in this study is parallel with the
phenomena and undoubtedly, the social media
with its strong popularity, can still give an influ-
ence to the public awareness even the antecedent
between variable was not assertively reacted.
Practically, this study suggests that event organ-
izer should acknowledge more on the differences
of each social media platform in order to use them
as a marketing tool. For example, generally, Face-
book page is known as a platform that connect
people around the world, as technology mature,
Facebook can now also be a medium to market
services and products, thus event organizer should
take digital marketing into consideration finding
all the functions that be can be used in order to
execute as one of the instrument for marketing.
In order to manage successful event market-
ing via social media, it is best that event organizer
could create a buzz in each of social media plat-
form so that it could be visible to all Internet users
globally. Creating hype such as hash tags and re-
tweet also played a big part in getting the success
of marketing an event.

5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

Referring to Table 1, the mean is 4.17 which showed
that respondents agree on how social media can influ-
ence their thoughts. Besides result proved that the
social media is very active and fast moving medium.
For an instance, when using Facebook to promote
an event, all the comments that are written in the
event page could sway possible attendees to actually
come and attend the event only by reading the good
feedbacks. Considering this, it seems that the event
organizer in this case study has the possibilities of
really reaching and maintaining the strongest event
awareness by the use of social media.
By looking at Table 2, it is proven that social
media is beneficial when the mean was recorded at
4.29. It could be said that, social media has provide
a fast track of communication as people can send,
receive or share the information almost immediately
with each other's. From the event organizers con-
text, they can just send or post notices about news
or activities to groups of friends or members of an

Table 1. Credibility of social media towards event
awareness (n = 101).

Table 2. Benefit of social media influence public in
event promotion (n = 101).

Table 3. Correlation model between popularity of
social media and event awareness (n = 101).