Social Media Promotion and Tourist Visiting Interest at Maimun Palace in Medan

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between perceived social media promotion and tourist visiting interest at Maimun Palace in Medan. A quantitative questionnaire survey involved 100 respondents selected purposively from people who had visited the destination and were willing to participate. The reported partial least squares model comprised social media promotion and visiting interest, each represented by three indicators. The standardized path coefficient was 0.896, with a bootstrap t statistic of 39.454 and p < .001. The model explained 80.3% of the variance in the visiting-interest construct, with an adjusted R² of 0.801. Outer loadings ranged from 0.860 to 0.935, while average variance extracted was 0.765 for promotion and 0.822 for visiting interest. However, the promotion construct failed the Fornell–Larcker criterion: its square root of average variance extracted, 0.875, was below the interconstruct correlation of 0.896. The results therefore indicate a positive association whose interpretation is limited by insufficient construct separation. Differences between the conceptual descriptions and several output labels also require clarification. The findings support further evaluation of accurate and credible destination communication, but do not establish that promotion causes additional visits or identify the independent contribution of particular promotional activities.