Abstract
Social media influencers, or digital creators followed by online audiences of thousands and millions, are a hot marketing tool that grows over 50% annually. Recently, the impact of COVID-19 on travel has severely disrupted this developing market, and heavily impacted travel influencers whose livelihood depends on collaboration with tourism, hospitality, and food businesses. This research presents the first “big data” evaluation of the induced transformations among the top Instagram travel influencers. The findings are based on computer image recognition of photographs published by 140 travel Instagrammers ranging from micro- to mega-influencers before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, the research proposes a methodology of identification of sponsored posts among travel influencers based on the fuzzy matching of post mentions and a global database of 6 million businesses.
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Notes
Retrieved June 22, 2022, from https://news.bloomberglaw.com/tech-and-telecom-law/social-media-endorsements-cant-escape-ftcs-watch.
E.g., Kylie Jenner is reportedly making up to $1 million for Instagram sponsored content (https://hireinfluence.com/blog/highest-paid-influencers/).
Data source available at: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/peopledatalabssf/free-7-million-company-dataset [access: 06/22/2022].
Retrieved June 22, 2022, from: https://spacy.io/models/en.
To remove misleading effect of small baseline values, we used log-difference Ln(Nyear1/Nyear2) to report relative change. Log-difference is the only measure of change, which is additive, symmetric, and normalised; it is widely used in economics. See Törnqvist et al. (1985) for justification.
Multiple tourism academics cite an order of magnitude higher engagement rates referencing Master's thesis by A. Christodoulaki (2018). Since the source is not retrievable, we could not confirm it. In our experience, the cited engagement rates are not attainable and possibly attributed to a misplaced decimal point.
Note a confusing industry term "organic influencer marketing" which stands for marketing with no monetary compensation. The influencer still receives non-monetary compensation such as free product samples.
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Kirilenko, A., Emin, K. & Tavares, K.C.N. Instagram travel influencers coping with COVID-19 travel disruption. Inf Technol Tourism 26, 119–146 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-023-00276-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40558-023-00276-7