Communication Strategies and Effect of Social Media Influencers’ Health Ideas

Abstract

This research aimed 1) to study communication strategies of social media influencers used to express health ideas affecting the followers, 2) to investigate effect of social influencers’ health ideas on the behavior and attitudes of followers. Qualitative research, analytic induction, was conducted through in-depth interviews done with three social media influencers on health ideas and 12 followers who believe in health concepts. After that the collected data was analyzed to make a conclusion and be raised in the discussion.

The results findings revealed that the social media influencers used four main communication strategies to express health ideas: 1) strategy of becoming social media influencers expressing health ideas 2)outstanding content presentation strategy, 3) social media use strategy and 4) follower network and participating activities creation strategy It indicated that the influencers must have knowledge and expertise in health content, good personality, high fitness level, leadership, and strong individual opinions. In addition, the influencers must have outstanding content presentation skills such as presenting accurate and up-to-date information, which ease the followers’ understanding, including using different social media tools for the presentation to offer alternative channels to followers..The study results towards the effect of social media influencers’ health ideas on followers presented that most followers have positive attitudes because the followers strongly believe and impress the social media influencer’ qualification, good personality, beautiful photos, fame, character, including doing activities with various followers. Also, there are still surrounding factors such as suggestion from friends, family, and society that inspire the followers to have positive attitude. As for the reasons that the followers who have negative attitude and stillness attitude still follow the social media influencers are adhesion reviews about information and images of health products or different types of products, or not following social trends. Explicitly, these two groups of followers desire to consume only health information but do not believe that the image of the content is true.