The effect of searching and surfing on recognition of destination images on Facebook pages

• Participants recalled the pictures from searching more accurately than those from surfing.
• Females show more accurate memory responses in the searching process.
• There is no different memory response between different technology experience groups.

Social networking sites (SNSs) are playing an increasingly important role as information sources for tourists. Among the various types of SNSs, Facebook has become the leading site in terms of number of users and volume of content. Despite the proliferation of Facebook, however, there has been little research on its users’ cognitive processes as they acquire visual images from photos. Particularly in the context of tourism and hospitality, one largely ignored area that warrants examination is individuals’ recognition accuracy when acquiring visual information via Facebook. Based on LC4MP, this study examines users’ ability to encode tourism information acquired from Facebook by differentiating the two types of information-search processing conditions, surfing and searching. After employing a visual-recognition test, the findings of this study indicated that participants recognized the photos they acquired from searching more accurately than the photos they acquired from surfing on destination Facebook pages. Further discussion and implications are provided in the text.