Impact of Influencer Marketing on Social Media Users’ Travel Intention

Abstract

Recently, the travel category has gained a lot of traction on social media platforms, with most content creators, bloggers, celebrities, and travelers using social media to convey and share their experiences with their communities. As digital adoption and technological infrastructure improves, the number of social media users and platforms grows. As a result, social media is now playing an increasingly important role in human decision making. This study adopts a descriptive quantitative research design and data was gathered using self- administrated questionnaire, the population of the study taken from the active social media users in western province and a sample of 150 users were selected using the convince sampling method and the hypothesis were tested using the correlation and the regression analysis. Findings revealed that influencer marketing has a positive impact on social media users' travel intentions, with all dependent variables, such as content quality and trustworthiness, showing statistically significant relationships with social media followers' travel intentions. The current study has important implications for destination marketers, tourism, hospitality, and advertising agencies by providing valuable insights for marketers to identify real impact on social media followers' travel intentions to determine the true impact of influencer marketing on travel intention in order to make appropriate decisions accordingly.