Information on social media - How useful is influencer advice on travel and media?

Information on social media - How useful is influencer advice on travel and media?

Lesley Simeon - August 8th, 2024

Social media influencers can be funny, entertaining, creative and sometimes even cringe. But is the content they create useful when audiences are looking for solid information?

This is the question a recent YouGov Surveys: Serviced poll asked consumers across 17 international markets. Earlier pieces discussed how useful respondents find social media influencers for information on tech, fitness andfashion. Here, we focus on travel and media.

Travel tops our list of topics consumers feel social influencers provide ‘useful’ information on - three in five (60%) respondents across markets say so. A slightly smaller proportion of consumers (57%) find social media influencers useful for information about media, like TV shows or movies.

Let’s now look at data from the individual markets surveyed.

Travel

By documenting their travels, influencers help users discover new destinations, drive away biases about offbeat places or plan the perfect ‘workation’ schedule for the holiday-deprived masses.

Indonesia (86%), India (86%), UAE (84%) and Hong Kong (83%) are the most likely across all markets surveyed to find such travel-related information put out by social media influencers useful. Denmark and Sweden (36% each) find themselves at the bottom of the table for finding this information useful.

Media

Consumers in Indonesia (87%), India (80%) and the UAE (80%) lead across markets in saying social media influencers are useful sources of information for media like TV shows or movies. In Europe, Brits (52%) and Italians (52%) lead in saying the same.

Less than third of all Danes (32%) surveyed are of the same opinion (the least likely across markets), while Singaporeans (at 76%, a majority of them nonetheless) are the least likely in Asia to say influencers give them useful media information.

Also read:

Do users find information from social media tech influencers helpful? Nearly three in five do

Do social media users find fitness and exercise advice by influencers on these platforms useful?

From kitchen to closet - nearly three in five users find fashion and food influencer advice helpful

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Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from
nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 17 markets with sample sizes varying between 511 and 2051 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in May 2024. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.

Photo by Cortney Wood on Unsplash