Bloggers - as Opinion Leaders: Building Trust to Improve Advertising Effectiveness

This work is devoted to the problem of existence of the phenomenon of blogging in terms of building the audience's trust in it and increasing the advertising effectiveness on the platform of the social network Instagram. Not possessing a unique qualification, bloggers become leaders of opinions, a new channel of communication and enjoy the confidence of the audience. The purpose of this work is to determine the factors of the formation of a trusting attitude to the author of the blog and his advertising message in Instagram. The study uses a qualitative method of data collection. Based on the analysis of individual in-depth interviews, the peculiarities of the perception of the blogger by the audience, the differences in the factors of the blogger's impact on people of different sex and age are established, and the question of why bloggers are the leaders of opinions is given. As an investigation task, an attempt has been made to describe the features of Internet communication as a kind of social interaction that fosters confidence building and promotion of advertising; Identify the nature of the audience's trust in bloggers, identify the importance that users of the social network Instagram attach to bloggers and their broadcast content, factors that contribute to the formation of a positive image of the blogger; To study the influence of the personal involvement of the blogger and the feedback on the formation of the audience's trust in him. As informants are users of the social network Instagram, and as experts - the practice of communication in the social network, that is, bloggers. Through analysis, it was concluded that trust in bloggers is more personalized, and the audience perceives advertising from bloggers as advice from a good acquaintance, rather than advertising to increase sales.