The Use of Social Media for Engaging People with Environmentally Friendly Lifestyle: A Conceptual Model

Abstract

Some recent research has investigated factors affecting household recycling and waste reduction behavior (Ho and So, 2017; Nishio and Takeuchi, 2005) in traditional media platforms like newspaper, radio, and television, but scant related to social media. In this study, we develop a conceptual model for comparing how traditional media and social media can be used as platforms for promoting and engaging young people in adopting an environmentally friendly lifestyle. We are particularly interested in the impact of social media on the engaging young people because: (i) there is huge population of young and active users on social media; and (ii) prior research reports that social media may contribute for value co-creation (See-To and Ho, 2014) in a marketing campaign through the interactions among the users and the owner of the social media, thus affecting the users’ behavior accordingly.