Social Media Travel Influencers: Strategic Insights and Impact on Domestic Travel Decision Making by Thai Millennials

Abstract

The prevalence of advanced technology has brought a new dynamic form of communication in several business sectors, including travel industry. People, especially millennials or Gen Y, increasingly utilize social platforms as an idea-sharing space. This generation apparently continues to lose interest in traditional advertising as influencer marketing is considered more effective for endorsement and can influence travel decision making. Therefore, this study’s purposes are (1) to analyze the importance of Thai SMTIs’ and their characteristics, such as source credibility, quality of content, and advertising disclosure on Thai millennials’ travel decision-making process, (2) to explore the Thai SMTIs’ interaction with their followers and organization of their organic content, and (3) to investigate the practices and strategies of Thai SMTIs in organizing their sponsored content and interaction with sponsors. The target population of this research consists of two groups: the first group was Thai millennials (birth year 1981-2000) and the second group was Thai social media travel influencers. Quantitative approach was applied by developing questionnaire survey to gather information from the side of Thai millennials. Qualitative approach was applied by conducting semi-structured interviews to investigate in-depth information on the side of Thai SMTIs. The actual sample size for Thai tourist participated was 436 respondents and 21 Thai SMTIs were interviewed. The findings indicate that Thai millennials tend to rely on the comments or reviews from social media travel influencers/bloggers (80.2%) as the primary information source; nevertheless, the most influential person when it came to travel decision making, unsurprisingly, was family and friends. The most popular platforms that this generation uses are Facebook and YouTube. Thai millennials’ attitudes on Thai SMTIs, regardless of gender, age or level of education, are found to be positive as these endorsers are perceived as credible and reliable. The respondents place significantly high level of positive engagement in content that is useful and interesting to them even when the content includes sponsorship. The second set of data derived from interviews found that the tactics that SMTIs utilize when creating a sponsored post include posting time, number of product photos, tie-in strategy, useful and interesting content, and avoiding explicit advertising words. The product or service they presented should be relevant to their identity. Most of the participants also remarked the important characteristics of SMTIs which consist of passion on travel, authenticity, photography skills, and communication skills. This study recommends that SMTIs should exhibit transparency and authenticity which are the vital attributes when millennials decide to follow an influencer. Each influencer has their own uniqueness; therefore, the marketers should understand SMTIs’ characteristics and make sure they fit the product or service. The marketers also should allow content creators to freely produce the content so that they can unveil their creativity as they want and enjoy.