Self-Presentation Strategies on Instagram and Their Impact on Audience's Trust in Healthy Lifestyle Blogs

The present study aims at describing the process of Healthy Living Instagram Bloggers’ self-presentation as a competent source of information and its impact on the audience’s trust. A lot of research has been done on people’s trust in blogs using the Source Credibility Theory in the context of blogger’s self-presentation, although researchers could not come to a consensus about the most influential self-presentation strategies, especially in the sphere of health. Taking this fact into consideration, the study described below might be a rather important contribution into this theory development. Firstly, using the method of content analysis, we reveal the main self-presentation strategies of 42 bloggers’ in the healthcare sector on Russian Instagram. Afterwards, the online-experiment is made to find the best strategies for health-related bloggers to be perceived as credible sources of information by their audience. This paper includes a literature review with conceptualization of the study, operationalization of the main components of the Source Credibility Theory from the health-related bloggers’ self-presentation point of view, the description of methods and results of the study. Key words: Source Credibility Theory, credibility on Instagram, credible blogs, expert blogs, bloggers’ self-presentation.