HOW FOREIGN SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCERS HELP SHAPE DESTINATION COUNTRY’S TOURISM IMAGE

In the context of tourism, the current study differentiates social media influencers (SMIs) as local SMIs and foreign SMIs. The current study argues that foreign SMIs help to create a positive (or sometimes negative) image of another destination country abroad which they have visited or lived in, unlike local SMIs who mostly help promote touristic places of their own country in their own country. While prior studies have investigated the influence of social media influencers (SMIs) in travel decisions in general, it is not clear whether foreign SMIs can help shape another destination country’s tourism image (DCTI) abroad. The current study fills this gap by investigating French SMIs’ influence in shaping South Korea’s destination-country image in France. The leading French SMIs who actively create and share content about South Korea on their social media channels, such as YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitch, are identified and analyzed. Applying the netnographic method to four SMIs’ communities of followers shows that French SMIs directly influence the DCTI of South Korea in France by influencing their cognitive, affective, and conative dimensions, although the effect on each varied. Moreover, the affective route had the highest impact, followed by the cognitive and conative route.