Proposing an Extension of the Technology Acceptance Model to Explain Facebook User Acceptance of Facebook Event Page

The emergence and growth of social media today has changed the way that people communicate and interact with each other. Thus, social media has considered as an effective tool in the marketing campaign. In regard to event marketing, event planners and organizers use social media (e.g. social network sites) as an important marketing medium to increase the number of potential attendees to visit the events. However, the major challenge to event marketers is to fully understand the process of how social media marketing gain special event customers’ acceptance. This study chose Facebook event page as study context and applied the technology acceptance model (TAM) as theoretical foundation. In addition, this paper synthesizes the theoretical basis of the event marketing, emotional factors, perceived relevance and its application to social media (e.g., Facebook event page) from previous studies. The study aims to come out with a conceptual model (extended TAM) which explains fully inner-mechanism of the relationships among variables: (1) the emotions that online fansexpress on Facebook affect their acceptance of the Facebook event page as a legitimate marketing tool; (2) perceived relevance from user perspective influence their acceptance of the Facebook event page; (3) this “acceptance” mechanism has an impact on fans’ intentions to attend the event.