Virtual Interactions for Actual Value: Unpacking the Role of Social Media in Value Cocreation Large-Scale Tourism Development Projects

Large-scale tourism development projects are popular for their impact on regional economic growth and global tourism attractiveness. Although it is widely recognized that they frequently get resistance from local residents due to their nature as unwanted projects, further hindering the already challenging process of value cocreation among project owners and tourists, there is still a gap in understanding how social media can be leveraged to turn the situation around. This study adopts a value cocreation perspective to examine how large-scale tourism development project stakeholders engage in collaborative processes through social media, using a case study to uncover the nuances of these interactions. Two popular large-scale tourism development projects in China were selected as cases because they have gone viral and attracted widespread regional and national attention on social media. An abductive approach is used for analyzing the empirical data collected by the web crawling technique, including videos and comments from TikTok. The results found that social media promotes value cocreation among heterogeneous stakeholders in large-scale tourism development projects in three ways: real-time project-centric improvement, multiperspective expectation management, and distinctive value generation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed based on findings.