The growing popularity of social media influencers (SMI) increasingly encourages destinations to use social media influencer marketing (SMIM) for their promotional campaigns. SMIs demonstrate the power of an individual based on certain factors employed to influence a broad segment of audience, and when it is used for marketing purposes, it is known as SMIM. SMIM is a part of the social media marketing that exercises all the commercial marketing techniques via social media channels. SMIM has impacted many industries including tourism, but looking at the progressive growth of SMIM today, it is surprising that such little attention had been paid to this area. However, while there is increasing use of SMIM by tourism organizations, there is a lack of research and limited knowledge on the roles of SMIM in travel and tourism. This chapter sheds light on the use of SMIM in the tourism sector where existing literature on the SMIM, its factors, and the influence of SMIM on the tourism sector by distinct authors are reviewed to identify the effectiveness of SMIM in the travel and tourism industry.
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Tourism demonstrates positive impacts on individuals, society and global economy as a whole. For an individual it opens the gate to the outside world where they encounter experiences with different people, customs and traditions contributing to the pathway of knowledge enrichment. It plays a huge role in preserving local culture and heritage, commercialisation of art and culture, and revitalisations of different customs and art forms. For enhancing economic growth, it plays an important role by improving the tax revenue, increasing the standard of living and employment opportunities. The travel and tourism's total contribution to the global economy is US$5.81 trillion, number of international tourists’ arrival is 426.9 million and the global leisure travel spend is US$2.37 trillion (Lock,2022b). The recent pandemic has adversely effected tourism industry where the global revenue for the travel and tourism industry was estimated US$396.37 billion in 2020 - a decrease of around 42.1 percent from 2019 which is significantly lower than the original 2020 forecast of around US$712 billion dollars (Lock,2022a).
Technological progression has been a boon to tourism industry where the evolution of internet especially social media is playing a significant role in many aspects of tourism such as information search, tourism marketing and promotion, interactions with customers, and so forth. Consumers engage themselves in social networking sites such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for research trips to gather information about the destination, airline, hotels etc so as to make an informed decision and to also share their personal experiences.
Global social networking user’s penetration has escalated from 42 percent in 2018 to 60 percent in 2022 and by 2027 it is expected to reach 74 percent (Dixon,2022a). As the pace of social media users are escalating, the tourism industry must make a good use of social media to reach and cater the needs of their market segment. Social media marketing (SMM) is a concept where social media acts as a marketing tool to promote the brand of a product or service, to engage and retain the consumers with an ultimate objective to sell the product or service (Saravanakumar & SuganthaLakshmi, 2012; Constantinides,2014; Pourkhani et al., 2019).
However, inclusion of social media influencers (SMI) has become one of the most prominent communication and marketing strategies by different industries. SMIs exhibit the power of an individual who can influence a broad market segment, and when SMI posts about a product or service on social media in exchange of compensation, it is known as social media influencer marketing (SMIM) (Glucksman, 2017; Campbell & Grimm, 2019; Campbell & Farrell, 2020). SMIM was limited to fashion, beauty and style, but now it has spread to almost every industry, with tourism being one of the sectors where SMIs have become crucial.
The purpose of this study is to propose an enhanced view on the role of SMI marketing in the tourism industry by integrating the contribution by different authors (Xu & Pratt, 2018; Gretzel, 2018; Vassakis et al., 2019; Lalangan,2020; Femenia-Serra & Gretzel, 2020; Cholprasertsuk, 2020; Jang et al., 2020; Yaagoubi & Machrafi,2021; Kusumadewi et al., 2021; Sesar et al., 2021; Asan, 2021; Seçilmiş et al., 2021; Georgea et al., 2021; Femenia-Serra et al., 2022) along with different factors of SMIM (i.e., appearance, content production, credibility, genuine self-sharing, and expertise) (Glucksman, 2017; Isyanto et al., 2020; Tsen & Cheng, 2021) to identify the effectiveness of SMIM in influencing the travel choice decisions of the followers.