The Impact of XiaoHongShu UGC on Travel Decision-Making of College Students with Different MBTI Personality Types

Xiaojing Xie

doi:10.54254/2754-1169/66/20241212

1. Introduction

1.1. Research Background

As travel restrictions gradually ease, consumers have more expectations and concerns for the tourism market. According to the 2023 China Consumption Trend Report released by Zhimeng Consulting, tourism ranks fourth among what consumers want to do after the epidemic [1]. As of July 2023, more than 22.9 million notes with the keyword “tourism” can be got in the app XiaoHongShu. There is no doubt that under the influence of We-Media, XiaoHongShu’s youthful user targeting, rich and diverse information scenes, hyper-relevant and personalised feeds, and a UGC (User Generated Content) community atmosphere that encourages creativity have gained the favor of many young people and become one of the important social platforms for youngsters to obtain tourism information and make travel decisions. College students as one of the main tourism forces of young groups; their travel demands are also expanding with the tourism recovery, and their tourism behavior is of great significance to the stability and development of the tourism market. Therefore, choosing college students as research objects and studying the impact of Xiaohongshu UGC on college students’ travel decisions has certain significance for the tourism market, whose publicity focus has gradually shifted to the online platform in the era of We-Media.

The continuous development of digital technology makes UGC widely used in various fields. Users can participate in producing, disseminating, and consuming information anytime and anywhere, while enterprises have found new channels for publicity and marketing. UGC, whose value has been recognized by society, has also attracted the attention of academic scholars.

1.2. Literature Review

By using SEM (Structural Equation Model) analysis, Wei & Tang proved that the quantity, quality, and information interaction of XiaoHongShu UGC would impact XiaoHongShu users’ consumption intention [2]. Narangajavana et al. found that before making travel decisions, tourists would make themselves more confident about the potential travel destinations by creating a motivation to accept UGC and seek more travel information through social media [3]. Combining the IAM model and the theory of planned behavior, Peng found in his empirical study that homosexuality and reciprocity can significantly affect the willingness to adopt information through the mediating role of perceived usefulness and perceived trust [4]. In the process of receiving UGC, the consumer personalities will also impact the consumption decision. On the basis of exploring the influence of UGC on consumers’ purchase intention, Lin introduced the Big Five personality theory and reached a conclusion that “high agreeableness of consumers will enhance the positive influence of the reliability and interaction of UGC on purchase intention” [5]. Tourism is an activity attaching great importance to the sense of experience. Tourists’ subjective attitude plays a significant role in the process of decision-making. Abundant studies have confirmed that tourists’ unique personality traits influence their leisure preferences and activity choices [6, 7]. Reviewing existing research results in the field of tourism, numerous scholars have respectively analyzed the impact of UGC or tourist personality on travel decision-making, but few studies involved the impact of tourist personality types on tourists’ attitudes towards UGC adoption. Therefore, to obtain more comprehensive results, it is important to consider the influence of both tourist personality and UGC on making travel decisions, given that tourists’ attitudes towards UGC may impact travel decision-making.

MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) is one of the popular social topics currently, and its measurement results show how the respondents receive information and make decisions. Both UGC and MBTI have become hot targets of marketing. A great number of users have already had a heated discussion about MBTI and travel on XiaoHongShu. However, in academia, few studies link MBTI to UGC or travel decision-making. This article draws on the experience of previous studies, innovatively introduces MBTI theory on the basis of the IAM (Information Adoption Model), and selects XiaoHongShu, a representative UGC platform, and college students, an important group of tourists, as research objects to explore the influence of XiaoHongShu UGC on college students’ travel decision-making. From a theoretical perspective, it can fill the gaps in the research of psychology, marketing, and tourism at the same time, while from a practical perspective, considering MBTI personality theory will not only help tourists to make more suitable travel decisions but also enable tourism agencies to carry out more targeted tourism product marketing and promote the vigorous development of the tourism market.

1.3. Research Framework

The logical thinking of the main research of this article can be divided into the following parts: First, exploring the relationship between tourists’ MBTI personality and the parts that tourists may have a subjective attitude towards when browsing UGC; Secondly, analyzing how UGC affects travel decision-making with considering the influence of tourists’ MBTI personality on adopting UGC; Finally, according to the travel decision-making tendency of college students with different MBTI personality types under the influence of UGC, putting forward some suggestions on how to make use of UGC in tourism marketing. The model and data collection involved in the research process will be elaborated in the following paragraphs.

2. Method

2.1. Survey Method

The survey method is usually used to ask the respondents for information or opinions through questionnaires and other forms [8]. This article selects college students as research objects to send questionnaires to collect research data which will be used to analyze the attitudes of college students with different MBTI personality types towards XiaoHongShu UGC related to tourism and their travel decision-making tendencies under the impact of UGC. According to the analysis results, this article will provide targeted marketing optimization suggestions.

2.2. Literature Research Method

Literature Analysis Method refers to extracting information related to the research topic by collecting literature data [8]. By reading the literature about UGC, travel decision-making, and consumer personality, this article understands the relationship between UGC and travel decision-making and the relationship between consumer personality and travel decision-making, finds the research gap among MBTI, UGC, and tourism, and gets the research inspiration of the research innovation and methods.

3. Results

3.1. Data Collection and Demographic Statistics

This study draws on the IAM model and previous research results for further analysis, designing a questionnaire containing basic personal information and users' perception of XiaoHongShu UGC to collect relevant research data [9,10]. The questionnaire was released on the Internet for college student users of XiaoHongShu from August 5 to August 9, 2023. A total of 209 respondents filled in the questionnaire, among which 196 were valid, with an effective rate of 93.78%. Among the respondents who provided valid data, 158 were women, and 38 were men, accounting for 80.61% and 19.39%, respectively, which is also in line with the situation that most of XiaoHongShu's users are young women, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Demographic statistics of the respondents.

Name	Option	Frequency	Percentage (%)
Gender	Male	38	19.39
Gender	Female	158	80.61
Grade	Freshman	27	13.78
	Sophomore	46	23.47
	Junior	51	26.02
	Senior	21	10.71
	First-year graduate student	20	10.20
	Second-year graduate student	19	9.69
	Third-year graduate student	12	6.12
Average monthly disposable amount	Less than 1,000 yuan	15	7.65
	1,000-2,000 yuan	116	59.18
	2,001-4,000 yuan	47	23.98
	4,001-7,000 yuan	12	6.12
	Greater than 7,000 yuan	6	3.06
Total		196	100.00

In terms of grade, 145 undergraduate students and 51 graduate students filled in the questionnaire in this survey. The majority of respondents were sophomores and juniors, with 46 and 51 individuals, respectively, accounting for 26.02% and 23.47%. Regarding the average monthly disposable amount, 59.18% of college students chose 1000-2000 yuan, and 23.98% chose 2001-4000 yuan. Compared to students in their first three years of college, seniors and graduate students have more disposable money every month, with the combined percentage of monthly disposable money over 2000 yuan exceeding 40% (as shown in Table 2.). That is, college students with higher spending power are more concentrated in higher grades, making them more likely to afford high-cost trips.

Table 2: Proportion of different grade students’ average monthly disposable amount.

	Less than 1,000 yuan	1,000-2,000 yuan	2,001-4,000 yuan	4,001-7,000 yuan	Greater than 7,000 yuan	Total
Freshman	3.70%	74.08%	11.11%	7.41%	3.70%	100.00%
Sophomore	13.04%	69.57%	15.22%	2.17%	0.00%	100.00%
Junior	5.88%	66.67%	17.65%	7.84%	1.96%	100.00%
Senior	0.00%	52.38%	42.86%	4.76%	0.00%	100.00%
First-year graduate student	10.00%	30.00%	30.00%	15.00%	15.00%	100.00%
Second-year graduate student	10.52%	47.37%	42.11%	0.00%	0.00%	100.00%
Third-year graduate student	8.33%	33.33%	41.68%	8.33%	8.33%	100.00%

3.2. The Impact of XiaoHongShu UGC on the Tourism Decision-Making of College Students

Considering the possible impact of tourists' personalities on the adoption attitude towards UGC, this article will combine MBTI theory to analyze relevant data of users' perception of XiaoHongShu UGC. The Likert scale will be used as the measurement method to assign different scores to the various options to indicate the degree of agreement with the UGC, where 1 means strongly disagree, 5 means strongly agree, and the degree of agreement is enhanced with a score increase. In order to explore the relationship between different MBTI personality types and UGC, this article calculates the mean and standard deviation of the recognition degree of different MBTI personality types on information quality, information source credibility, design attractiveness, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, and travel decision-making. The data are summarized in Table 3 to Table 8.

Table 3: Mean and standard deviation of the agreement degree of college students with type Extrovert, Introvert, Sensing or Intuition on XiaoHongShu UGC content.

		E (Extrovert)		I (Introvert)		S (Sensing)		N (Intuition)
		Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation
Information quality	Timeliness	4.250	0.668	4.054	0.615	4.101	0.568	4.103	0.674
	Accuracy	3.354	0.635	3.108	0.801	3.241	0.804	3.120	0.745
	Comprehensiveness	3.938	0.861	3.973	0.791	4.038	0.823	3.915	0.794
	Total	3.847	0.814	3.712	0.854	3.793	0.836	3.712	0.852
Information source credibility	Specialization	3.542	0.849	3.345	0.878	3.430	0.843	3.368	0.896
	Objectivity	3.000	0.899	3.034	0.899	3.013	0.809	3.034	0.955
	Trustworthiness	3.229	0.778	3.311	0.982	3.291	0.908	3.291	0.956
	Total	3.257	0.867	3.230	0.929	3.245	0.868	3.231	0.945
Design attractiveness	Clarity	3.583	0.821	3.568	0.882	3.544	0.859	3.590	0.873
	Creativity	3.875	0.866	3.932	0.762	3.937	0.722	3.906	0.830
	Aesthetics	4.167	0.694	4.189	0.684	4.114	0.660	4.231	0.700
	Total	3.875	0.827	3.896	0.819	3.865	0.786	3.909	0.844

Table 4: Mean and standard deviation of the agreement degree of college students with type Thinking, Feeling, Judgment or Perceiving on XiaoHongShu UGC content.

		T (Thinking)		F (Feeling)		J (Judgment)		P (Perceiving)
		Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation
Information quality	Timeliness	4.043	0.647	4.135	0.624	4.112	0.636	4.095	0.632
	Accuracy	3.071	0.822	3.222	0.736	3.138	0.775	3.190	0.768
	Comprehensiveness	3.857	0.889	4.024	0.753	3.975	0.711	3.957	0.869
	Total	3.657	0.895	3.794	0.814	3.742	0.828	3.747	0.859
Information source credibility	Specialization	3.229	0.920	3.484	0.837	3.413	0.910	3.379	0.851
	Objectivity	2.943	0.849	3.071	0.922	2.900	0.894	3.112	0.892
	Trustworthiness	3.171	0.978	3.357	0.907	3.188	0.915	3.362	0.945
	Total	3.114	0.921	3.304	0.904	3.167	0.927	3.284	0.903
Design attractiveness	Clarity	3.500	0.913	3.611	0.839	3.563	0.869	3.578	0.866
	Creativity	3.729	0.815	4.024	0.753	3.775	0.842	4.017	0.734
	Aesthetics	4.071	0.688	4.246	0.677	4.050	0.673	4.276	0.680
	Total	3.767	0.840	3.960	0.802	3.796	0.821	3.957	0.815

On the whole, for the information quality of XiaoHongShu UGC, there is no significant difference between college students with different MBTI personality types. The overall mean values are in the range of 3.6 to 3.9, and the standard deviations are all less than 1, indicating that most users have an upper and medium level of agreement with the information quality of XiaoHongShu UGC. However, from the perspective of the three specific dimensions, users' agreement degree of timeliness, whose mean values are all greater than 4 is significantly higher than that of accuracy, whose highest mean value is only 3.35, showing that XiaoHongShu bloggers still need to pay some attention to providing accurate information.

Similar to information quality, college students with different MBTI personality types show little difference in the agreement degree of information source credibility of XiaoHongShu UGC, with the overall mean ranging from 3.1 to 3.4. Interestingly, type Feeling with the highest overall mean (3.304) and type Thinking with the lowest overall mean (3.114) are the two endpoints of the dimension of judgment mode in MBTI personality types. In other words, when considering the reliability of UGC information sources, users with type Thinking show a more stringent judgment attitude than those with type Feeling, which is in line with the characteristics that type Thinking people value objective facts while type Feeling people value compassion [11]. However, regardless of the overall or specific dimensions, users with different MBTI personality types generally do not agree with the information source credibility of XiaoHongShu UGC. Even in terms of objectivity, the mean of type Judgment and type Thinking is less than 3.

College students with different MBTI personality types still do not show great differences in their overall views on the design attractiveness, and the mean values all are very close to 4. It can be seen that most college students have a high evaluation of the design attractiveness of XiaoHongShu UGC, especially the dimension of aesthetics, whose mean value is more than 4, indicating that aesthetics is a major advantage of XiaoHongShu UGC. In comparison, the mean value of clarity is around 3.5, which needs further improvement.

Table 5: Mean and standard deviation of agreement degree of college students with type Extrovert, Introvert, Sensing or Intuition on the perceived value of XiaoHongShu UGC.

		E (Extrovert)		I (Introvert)		S (Sensing)		N (Intuition)
		Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation
Perceived usefulness	Addressing travel concerns	4.042	0.798	3.932	0.735	3.962	0.741	3.957	0.759
	Helping plan trip efficiently	4.083	0.794	4.101	0.707	4.203	0.686	4.026	0.748
	Reminders and precautions	4.229	0.660	4.162	0.650	4.190	0.662	4.171	0.647
	Total	4.118	0.753	4.065	0.703	4.118	0.703	4.051	0.723
Perceived enjoyment	Stimulating traveling interest	4.375	0.761	4.108	0.818	4.063	0.882	4.248	0.753
	Enjoying browsing	3.958	0.713	4.000	0.808	3.937	0.806	4.026	0.771
	Striking emotional resonance	3.938	0.755	3.750	0.887	3.873	0.868	3.744	0.853
	Total	4.090	0.766	3.953	0.850	3.958	0.853	4.006	0.818

Table 6: Mean and standard deviation of agreement degree of college students with type Thinking, Feeling, Judgment or Perceiving on the perceived value of XiaoHongShu UGC.

		T (Thinking)		F (Feeling)		J (Judgment)		P(Perceiving)
		Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation
Perceived usefulness	Addressing travel concerns	3.843	0.735	4.024	0.753	3.837	0.737	4.043	0.751
	Helping plan trip efficiently	3.986	0.771	4.159	0.698	3.962	0.702	4.190	0.733
	Reminders and precautions	4.129	0.700	4.206	0.624	4.075	0.742	4.250	0.573
	Total	3.986	0.742	4.130	0.696	3.958	0.731	4.161	0.694
Perceived enjoyment	Stimulating traveling interest	4.043	0.731	4.246	0.846	4.037	0.787	4.267	0.817
	Enjoying browsing	3.829	0.798	4.079	0.765	3.825	0.839	4.103	0.727
	Striking emotional resonance	3.557	0.879	3.929	0.821	3.688	0.894	3.871	0.829
	Total	3.810	0.825	4.085	0.820	3.850	0.850	4.080	0.807

In terms of perceived usefulness, the data show a high mean and low standard deviation, meaning that college students with different MBTI personality types all agree with the usefulness provided by XiaoHongShu UGC. Among them, type Perceiving got the highest overall mean (4.161), and type Judgment got the lowest mean (3.958). Type Perceiving and type Judgment are the two endpoints of the lifestyle dimension in MBTI personality types. People with type Judgment are characterized by organization and planning. Before making travel plans, they often have preset all the possible traveling situations. But the type Perceiving people prefer a flexible and casual lifestyle, so they perceive that they get more help from XiaoHongShu UGC, which may be one of the reasons that Type Perceiving users have higher mean values on the reminders and precautions dimension than other users [11].

In terms of perceived enjoyment, no matter what kind of MBTI personality type, the dimension with the highest mean value is stimulating traveling interest, and the dimension with the lower mean value is striking emotional resonance. From the marketing perspective, XiaoHongShu UGC plays a certain role in encouraging traveling behavior, but does not provide enough emotional value to users and does not move users from deep inside.

Table 7: Mean and standard deviation of agreement degree of college students with type Extrovert, Introvert, Sensing or Intuition on travel decision-making after browsing XiaoHongShu UGC.

		E (Extrovert)		I (Introvert)		S (Sensing)		N (Intuition)
		Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation
Travel decision-making	Making travel plans	4.104	0.805	3.953	0.921	3.949	0.946	4.017	0.861
	Changing travel plans	3.646	0.887	3.507	1.007	3.430	0.843	3.615	1.057
	Putting travel plans into action	3.542	0.967	3.486	1.033	3.544	1.010	3.470	1.022
	Total	3.764	0.916	3.649	1.009	3.641	0.958	3.701	1.008

Table 8: Mean and standard deviation of agreement degree of college students with type Thinking, Feeling, Judgment or Perceiving on travel decision-making after browsing XiaoHongShu UGC.

		T(Thinking)		F(Feeling)		J(Judgment)		P(Perceiving)
		Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation	Mean	Standard deviation
Travel decision-makinng	Making travel plans	3.814	0.967	4.087	0.839	4.013	0.849	3.974	0.927
	Changing travel plans	3.329	1.032	3.659	0.931	3.475	0.914	3.586	1.022
	Putting travel plans into action	3.286	1.024	3.619	0.995	3.650	0.915	3.397	1.070
	Total	3.476	1.032	3.788	0.946	3.713	0.917	3.652	1.034

From the perspective of specific dimensions, college students with different MBTI personality types have the greatest agreement degree of the influence of XiaoHongShu UGC on making travel plans, which is consistent with the dimension of stimulating traveling interest that users have the highest agreement degree with perceived enjoyment, but the mean values of the dimensions of changing travel plans and putting travel plans into action are not high enough. It shows that XiaoHongShu UGC cannot fully influence college students' traveling-decision, and its role in promoting tourism is limited. However, it can be found that college students with different MBTI personality types have similar agreement degrees of UGC content and perceived value as well as of traveling decisions by ranking the overall mean values (as shown in Table 9. and Table 10.). That is, it can be inferred whether XiaoHongShu UGC will have a greater impact on their travel decisions through the attitudes of different personalities towards XiaoHongShu UGC. For example, the type Thinking users’ overall mean values of each of the six categories are all at the lowest.

Table 9: The overall mean ranking of agreement degree of college students with type Extrovert, Introvert, Sensing or Intuition on XiaoHongShu UGC.

	E (Extrovert)		I (Introvert)		S (Sensing)		N (Intuition)
	Mean	Rank	Mean	Rank	Mean	Rank	Mean	Rank
Information quality	3.847	1	3.712	6	3.793	3	3.712	6
Information source credibility	3.257	3	3.230	6	3.245	4	3.231	5
Design attractiveness	3.875	5	3.896	4	3.865	6	3.909	3
Perceived usefulness	4.118	3	4.065	5	4.118	3	4.051	6
Perceived enjoyment	4.090	1	3.953	6	3.958	5	4.006	4
Travel decision-making	3.764	2	3.649	6	3.641	7	3.701	4

Table 10: The overall mean ranking of agreement degree of college students with type Thinking, Feeling, Judgment or Perceiving on XiaoHongShu UGC.

	T (Thinking)		F (Feeling)		J (Judgment)		P (Perceiving)
	Mean	Rank	Mean	Rank	Mean	Rank	Mean	Rank
Information quality	3.657	8	3.794	2	3.742	5	3.747	4
Information source credibility	3.114	8	3.304	1	3.167	7	3.284	2
Design attractiveness	3.767	8	3.960	1	3.796	7	3.957	2
Perceived usefulness	3.986	8	4.130	2	3.958	7	4.161	1
Perceived enjoyment	3.810	8	4.085	2	3.850	7	4.080	3
Travel decision-making	3.476	8	3.788	1	3.713	3	3.652	5

In addition to statistics on the data of agreement degree, this article sorts out. It ranks the data related to the preference of college students with different MBTI personality types for UGC presentation forms and tourist attraction types involved in the content of UGC. It is found that the most preferred UGC presentation form of college students is pictures, followed by videos and text, which means that there is no huge difference in the preference of college students with different MBTI personality types for UGC presentation form. For different tourist attraction types, college students with different MBTI personality types also do not show great differences. The most popular tourist attraction type is natural scenery, and the least popular is religion-related. Except for natural scenery, the tourist attraction types that most college students like include outdoor entertainment, humanities and history, and folk customs.

4. Discussion

According to the analysis results of the questionnaire, it can be seen that college students with different MBTI personality types generally have problems with the low-level perception of XiaoHongShu UGC’s information accuracy, information source credibility, clarity, emotional resonance, which can affect college students’ travel decisions. Combining the characteristics and preferences of different MBTI personality types, this article proposes four suggestions for optimizing XiaoHongShu UGC.

First, improve the review mechanism and strengthen user guidance. XiaoHongShu can introduce professional travel influencers, authoritative tourism organizations, and tourism experts to evaluate and recommend travel-related UGC, authenticating users with certain qualifications or experience and giving real and accurate information more exposure to encourage users to provide real and detailed tourism experience sharing. Compared with the UGC uploaded by ordinary users, professionals can provide users with reliable and objective evaluations and suggestions based on their experience and professional knowledge, enhancing information quality and credibility of information sources. Moreover, XiaoHongShu should teach college students with insufficient social experience how to evaluate and verify UGC to help them better judge the accuracy of the information and reduce their expectation gap.

Second, improve UGC readability and clear UGC information. On the basis of adhering to the advantages of UGC aesthetics, XiaoHongShu bloggers can attach the content directory navigation to the UGC cover and sort out the classification of UGC works, which can improve the overall logic of UGC so that college students can quickly find the information they are interested in, and can select and sort according to their own needs. At the same time, XiaoHongShu can also provide users who are not good at designing and typesetting with a simple, intuitive, and easy-to-use UGC template to help them make a clear UGC to enhance the readability of UGC. College students searching for tourism information are also more likely to accept the information UGC expresses.

Third, vitalize information interaction and meet emotional needs. Emotional needs play an important role in consumer decision-making, affecting consumers' attitudes towards products or services, purchase intention, and loyalty [12]. XiaoHongShu can expand the functional diversification of the UGC community, strive to realize the self-perceived value of college students so that they can find like-minded partners and obtain recognition from other users by sharing, and can form emotional resonance with the travel-related content published on XiaoHongShu, for the sake of improving the satisfaction and loyalty of college students on the platform, continuing to enlarge the XiaoHongShu UGC volume in the field of tourism, and promoting the marketing role of XiaoHongShu in the tourism market.

Last but not least, optimize the recommendation algorithm and correctly target audiences. Based on users' past search records and user survey data analysis, combined with the characteristics of different MBTI personality types, XiaoHongShu should understand the needs of users with different personalities for tourism products and services, accurately offer UGC feeds in line with users' preferences, and carry out corresponding marketing strategies for targeted and personalized promotion. For example, college students with ISTJ personalities like to collect a lot of information through observation and experience and make a comprehensive evaluation before making decisions. What’s more, as youngsters, college students like innovative things. XiaoHongShu UGC presented pictures and videos containing as much detailed information as possible should be pushed to attract the attention of college students with ISTJ personalities to improve their perceived usefulness of UGC and achieve the marketing transformation of their travel decisions.

5. Conclusion

5.1. Key Findings

In the context of the backgrounds including consumers' stronger desire to travel, MBTI and UGC becoming marketing hot objects, and the lack of research linking MBTI with UGC or tourism decision-making, based on the MBTI theory, this article analyzes the impact of XiaoHongShu UGC on the travel decisions of college students with different MBTI personality types, providing a reference for a new marketing way of tourism-related organizations, which is conducive to promoting the tourism market to use social networks better to carry out marketing and help tourists more easily obtain the wanted travel information to realize online marketing transformation of tourism products and services.

Taking IAM model as the basic analysis framework, this study explores six aspects: UGC’s information quality, information source credibility, design attractiveness, college students’ perceived usefulness, and perceived enjoyment on UGC, and travel decisions made by college students after browsing UGC. It is found that college students with different MBTI personality types do not show significant differences in the overall agreement degree of the above six aspects. Except for the information source credibility, most college students give a relatively high evaluation of XiaoHongShu UGC’s content and perceived value whose agreement degrees have a certain predictive effect on the influence degree of XiaoHongShu UGC on the college students’ travel decisions, but the influence effect is limited.

By organizing patterns of agreement degree of college students with different MBTI personality types on XiaoHongShu UGC, this study also found that college students do not hold a very optimistic attitude towards the information accuracy, clarity, and emotional resonance of UGC in addition to the information source credibility. These problems have a negative impact on college students’ travel decisions, so four suggestions for XiaoHongShu UGC optimization are put forward, that is, improving the review mechanism and strengthening user guidance, improving UGC readability and clearing UGC information, vitalizing information interaction and meeting emotional needs, and optimizing recommendation algorithm and correctly targeting audiences.

5.2. Limitations and Future Study

This study only provides a new idea for the tourism market to use UGC to enhance marketing influence, lacking practical experience. In addition, this study's research methods are mainly qualitative, and the data support is insufficient. Suppose there is an opportunity to expand this research. In that case, quantitative methods and data technologies may be further used to explore further the specific moderating effect of MBTI personalities on users' adoption of UGC to provide a reference for other industries to perform marketing on social platforms by combining consumer personality characteristics.

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Cite this article

Xie,X. (2024). The Impact of XiaoHongShu UGC on Travel Decision-Making of College Students with Different MBTI Personality Types. Advances in Economics, Management and Political Sciences,66,97-107.

Data availability

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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Volume title: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Business and Policy Studies

ISBN：978-1-83558-263-3(Print) / 978-1-83558-264-0(Online)

Editor：Arman Eshraghi

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Conference date: 27 February 2024

Series: Advances in Economics, Management and Political Sciences

Volume number: Vol.66

ISSN：2754-1169(Print) / 2754-1177(Online)

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References

[1]. Xiao, M. C. Tourism boom, insight into six travel trends 2023 | Zhimeng’s report, 2023.4.11, 2023.8.2, http://k.sina.com.cn/article_1265695842_4b70fc62001017yve.html.

[8]. Liu, S. & Zhang, C. L. (2002). Approach to exploring the true meaning of communication: Research methods of communication. Heilongjiang People’s Publishing House.

[9]. Sussman, S. W. , & Siegal, W. S. . (2003). Informational influence in organizations: an integrated approach to knowledge adoption. Information systems research (1), 14.

[11]. Xiang, L. (2013). Analysis of Jung's thoughts on mental health. Zhejiang Education Press.

[12]. Aaker, D. A. , & Hagerty, S. M. R. . (1986). Warmth in advertising: measurement, impact, and sequence effects. Journal of Consumer Research, 12(4), 365-381.