Social media has become pervasive as a marketing tool, yet we know relatively little about how engagement with social media concurrently with consumption of a service experience influences satisfaction with that experience. Furthermore, we have only limited understanding of whether the recording of an experience facilitates long-term memory recall of the experience, or undermines it by distracting attention during the service encounter. We review literature on memory processes to test hypotheses relating to the effects of social media on satisfaction and subsequent recall. We test our hypotheses in a three-stage, time lagged study of visitors to three museums and art galleries.

We find that social media engagement during an event has a positive effect on memorability of that event, but only in the short-term memory, as our analysis showed us in the long-term memory there is no significant effect. We also found that although memorability of an event has a positive effect on short-term future behaviour intention, in the longer run, it has no effect.