THE CORRELATION BETWEEN CREDIBILITY AND INTENTION TO FOLLOW TRAVEL BLOGGER’S INSTAGRAM

• Main Author: G A Widya Pramesti Arimartha, I
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/64684
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

Traveling is one of the most favorite activities that people do these days. These travelers usually read the reviews online and search for a certain places through the Internet. Since most people believe third party review, many brands or companies hire certain influencers who have a suitable background with their brands to increase their brand awareness. These influencers can easily influence people through the Internet especially Instagram. Instagram is one of the most favorite platforms that is being used by people nowadays. This study focused on Traveler Blogger on Instagram because these travel bloggers can easily influence people through the images or videos and captions that they shared. People can know something new about a certain destinations, tips, and tricks about traveling and any other traveling suggestion by following the travel bloggers via the internet especially Instagram. These influencers usually share their activities, ideas or the review of a place, motivational and inspirational post on their Instagram. These influencers have the credibility that can make their audiences interest in the brand that they promoted. The strength of how they influenced people are depends on their credibility that can be affected by trustworthiness, attractiveness, and expertise. Attractiveness can be defined as the characteristics of the influencers that can attract or gain the intention towards the brand or product from the audiences, it can be measured by the physical appearance, fashion style, and the aesthetic of Instagram feeds. Trustworthiness is measured by how trusted these influencers are to influences their audiences, this can be seen through the how well they wrote the caption to tell stories and tips. Expertise can be measured by how expert they are of being a traveller or how many destinations that they have been visited. Thus, there are three independent variables in this study such as attractiveness, trustworthiness, and expertise. For the dependent variable, it is intention to follow. To examine the correlation between each subjects of credibility and the intention to follow, Author used Classical Assumption Test and Multiple Linear Regression. The result of this study showed that the Attractiveness and Trustworthiness are positively significant related to the intention to follow meanwhile Expertise do not positively significant related to the intention to follow. For gaining their own audiences, the Travel Bloggers have to create the good credibility image by considering the attractiveness, trustworthiness, and also the expertise of being the travel influencer. For the better research in the future, we can use mix method for the research, those are qualitative and quantitative. This research is not only can be measured by the number but also can be considering by the feelings that could be got through the depth-interview in qualitative method. Then, we also can add more attribute for example attractiveness can be divided into several categories, trustworthiness can be divided into several categories, and so does the expertise. We also can add more variable, for example the source of preference in this study.