SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING ACTIVITY INFLUENCES VISIT INTEREST TO INDONESIAN TOURISM DESTINATION WITH BRAND EQUITY AS INTERVENING VARIABLE

Abstract

Social media, such as Instagram, is the most widely utilized kind of media since it can reach a large number of people. Currently, the Indonesian tourism sector promotes Indonesian tourism to travelers, particularly millennial tourists, using digital channels, one of which is social media. As a result, the author is eager to raise awareness of the phenomena of social-media-marketing in the tourist business. The goal of this research is to see how much influence of social-media-marketing efforts have on the visit interest of Indonesian tourist sites via intervening brand equity factors among travelers who follow the IG account @Pesonaid_travel. The quantitative research approach was applied with a measuring scale called as Likert scale. With a sample of 400 responders, the population in this study was followers of the Instagram account @Pesonaid_travel. The sampling strategy is non-probability sampling, and the SEM (structured-equation-model) is a method of data analysis with the SmartPLS program. The findings of this study include respondents' answers to varied social-media-marketing activity and interest in visiting the good category, as well as respondents' responses to varying brand equity. Hypothesis testing reveals that, in addition to the effects of social-media-marketing activity on visit interest via intervening brand equity factors, which has a positive but non-significant effect, the other hypotheses have a positive and significant effect.