Social media has become a primary channel for arts and cultural venues to engage audiences, reshaping how young people—often described as digital natives—participate in cultural life. Compared with traditional event-centered promotion, social media emphasizes sustained interaction, distinctive content styles, and emotional connection, encouraging young audiences to move from passive information reception to active participation and feedback. However, much of the arts and cultural marketing literature still treats social media as a single explanatory factor, providing limited empirical evidence on how specific content characteristics correspond to different participation motivations. Using an arts and cultural venue in central Taiwan as a case study, this research examines how social media content characteristics relate to Generation Z audiences’ participation motivations. Drawing on prior studies of arts audiences and social media, participation motivations are conceptualized into four types: exploration and learning, social belonging, cultural identity, and emotional regulation. Social media content characteristics are operationalized across four dimensions: informativeness, entertainment, interactivity, and emotional appeal. Data are collected via a questionnaire survey, and structural equation modeling (SEM) is employed to test the hypothesized relationships between content characteristics and each motivational type. As young audiences are long-term key participants in arts and cultural activities, this study clarifies how social media content design may shape youth participation motivations, addresses an empirical gap in research on youth cultural participation in Taiwan’s arts sector, and offers practical implications for venues’ content planning and engagement strategies.

Authors:
Yu-Jing Hsiao, Feng Chia University, Taiwan
Yueh-Tuan Li, Feng Chia University, Taiwan

About the Presenter(s)
Yu-Jing Hsiao is a master’s student in Global Marketing at Feng Chia University, Taiwan. Her research examines how social media content characteristics influence Generation Z audiences’ participation motivations in arts and cultural activities.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Sunday Schedule

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