Abstract
Social media and the power of word-of-mouth (WOM) have resulted in the rise of user-generated content (UGC) which thereby created prominent users who have congregated their own clout of followers as opinion leaders of the new digital century – social media influencers (SMIs). Becoming an integral player in the marketing industry in Singapore, Destinations Management/Marketing Organisations (DMOs) are recognising the influential power of SMIs, employing them as part of its integrated marketing strategy to increase inbound tourism. However, effectiveness of SMI marketing, even more so, social media campaign of a DMO has been minimally examined. Thus, to evaluate the effectiveness of the SMI marketing campaign executed by Hokkaido Tourism Organization, factor analysis and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) is used. This study suggests that SMI marketing is effective in changing attitude among consumers, especially on destination image, which would consequently affect the consumers’ travel intention and intention to do word-of-mouth.
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Ong, Y.X., Ito, N. (2019). “I Want to Go There Too!” Evaluating Social Media Influencer Marketing Effectiveness: A Case Study of Hokkaido’s DMO. In: Pesonen, J., Neidhardt, J. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2019. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05940-8_11
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