The Influence of Social Media towards Intention to Visit Lake Toba

in North Sumatera

Endang Sulistya Rini and Beby Karina F. Sembiring

Department of Management, Universitas Sumatera Utara, Jl. Prof. T.M Hanafiah, SH, Kampus USU, Medan, Indonesia

Keywords: Social Media, Intention to Visit

Abstract: Lake Toba is one of the many places to visit in Indonesia. The volcanic lake, which has the dimension of 100

km long and 30 km wide; making it the biggest lake in Southeast Asia, is located in the province of North

Sumatra. It has eye-catching scenery and boasts many attractions that can be experienced, starting from

cultural experience and natural spots, manmade or not. Unfortunately, the lake is spoiled by household and

agricultural wastes. The water became polluted and has foul odor. The method of research is qualitative mixed

with quantitative with a descriptive technique. The data was acquired by asking 100 tourists that have never

visited the lake. The result of this research can be used as a mean for the government to increase the number

of visitors the lake has.

1 INTRODUCTION

Tourism activities not only provide national income,

they also stimulate the socioeconomic of the

community welfare by creating new jobs as well as

bringing in foreign investments. This trend prompts

each province to develop its own tourism program by

marketing, improving infrastructure, building tourist

facilities, etc.

Social media is a group of internet-based

applications that are built based on ideology and

technology of Web 2.0, which makes user-generated

content exchange possible (Kaplan & Haenlein,

2010:53). According to Paramitha (2011:42), social

media is a media that allows social interaction in two

ways. Social media changes how information is being

spread on the internet, from one to the peers and

become peers to peers. Based on this research, social

media is an online communication tool that makes

social interaction easier which allows information to

travel further among the audience. Social media has

five characteristics such as participation, openness,

conversation, community, and connectivity.

The existence of internet-based social media

enables one person to communicate with hundreds,

even thousands of people, that can also be used by the

government to introduce and promote tourist

attractions. Foux (2006:6) said consumers (tourists)

assume that social media is a reliable source of

information for advertisement and service.

Consumers (tourists) that use a different kind of

social media tend to look for more information before

making a final decision (decision to visit). Basically,

the decision to visit is the decision one makes before

deciding to visit a place based on several factors. The

decision to visit is influenced by appealing factors

and driving factors. Driving factors are internal

factors that push an individual to travel while

appealing factors are factors from external that attract

the individual to the destination. (Crompton in Kozak

& Decrop, 2009:17).

One of the main tourist attractions in Indonesia is

Lake Toba. It is located in the province of North

Sumatra and is the biggest volcanic lake in Southeast

Asia. With length reaching 100 km and width of 30

km, the lake has spectacular sight and possesses many

unique attractions such as cultural experience and

natural spots, both natural and manmade.

Unfortunately, upon closer inspection, the lake is

being polluted by household and agricultural wastes.

The water has become polluted and emits a foul odor.

According to data from the Central Bureau of

Statistics (Badan Pusat Statistik - BPS) of North

Sumatra, there was a drop in the number of foreign

tourists that visited the lake in 2018. Foreign tourists

reached 270,837 in 2014, 229,288 in 2015, 233,643

in 2016, and 261,461 in 2017. However, in 2018,

there were only 231,465 foreign tourists; even after

the government has designated Lake Toba as one of

four of super prioritized main attractions. Toba is

expected to bring in 20 million foreign visitors and

Rini, E. and F. Sembiring, B.

The Inﬂuence of Social Media towards Intention to Visit Lake Toba in North Sumatera.

DOI: 10.5220/0009200201330136

In Proceedings of the 2nd Economics and Business International Conference (EBIC 2019) - Economics and Business in Industrial Revolution 4.0, pages 133-136

ISBN: 978-989-758-498-5

133

275 million local visitors in 2019 which will bring the

income of IDR 16 trillion.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Social Media

According to Kotler and Keller (2012:568), social

media is a tool that can be used to share texts,

pictures, audio, and videos with another user as well

as establishments.

Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) in Lesmana (2012:1)

define social media as a group of internet- based

applications that were built upon the ideology and

technology of Web 2.0 and enable the creation and

the exchange of user-generated content. Web

2.0 has become the very foundation of social

media. Social media is divided into different

categories; including social networks, forums,

weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wiki, podcasts,

pictures, videos, ratings, and social bookmarks.

(Lesmana, 2012:10)

According to Paramitha (2011:42), social media

is a media that was designed to give easy access to

social interactions that are interactive or two ways.

Social media is based on internet technology that

changes the way information spreads from one to the

peers to become peers to peers.

Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein (2010)

categorize social media into 6 (six) types:

1. Collaborative projects give ways to collaborate in

content creation among users simultaneously, i.e.

Wikipedia. A number of sites like this allow their

users to add, delete, and edit contents. Another

type of collaborative project is social

bookmarking that groups up anything that is

related to content media to the user liking.

2. Blogs are one of the first types of social media that

grew as private web and in general, show date-

stamped entries in chronological order. The most

popular type of blog is a text-based blog.

3. Content communities have their main goal of

sharing media content among users, such as text,

photos, videos, and PowerPoint presentations.

The users do not have to create a private profile

page.

4. Social networking sites allow users to connect

with each other to create a profile with private

information and invite friends and family to

access the said profile and send emails as well as

instant messages. A profile usually consists of

photos, videos, audio recordings, blogs, etc.

Example of social networking sites are Facebook,

MySpace, and Google+

5. Virtual game worlds are platforms that replicate

the environment into three dimensions (3D)

which allow the users to appear as an avatar and

interact with others according to the rules.

6. The virtual social world allows the inhabitants to

act freely and to live as an avatar in a virtual world

like in real life. An example of this is Second Life.

According to Purnama (2011:116), social media

has its own special characteristics, including:

1. Range: The range of social media, from local to

global

2. Accessibility: social media can be accessed easily

with a cheaper fee.

3. Usability: social media is relatively easy to use

because there is no need for training or skills

4. Immediacy: social media could produce instant

reaction of the mass

5. Permanence: social media could change

comments instantly by editing.

2.2 Intention to Visit

The tourist’s interest to visit in Marketing for

Hospitality and Tourism can be assumed with the

interest to buy a product (Sholikha 2019). Meanwhile,

consumers’ interest to buy is part of a consumer’s

behavior in consuming, with the tendency of being

respondent before making the right decision in buying

the product (Fitriah, 2018:77).

According to Annafik and Rahardjo, the buying

interest is a phase when an individual list all possible

choice to buy and ends up buying a product or a

service based on several consideration. (Fitriah,

2018:78) claims that buying interest is obtained from

the learning process and thoughts that could shape a

perception.

Buying temptation according to Fungkiya (2018)

is a tendency, passion, and desire to possess

something. Temptation is an aspect of psychology

that has an enormous effect to an individual’s

behavior as well as a source of motivation that will

guide them in what they are doing. According to

Ferdinand (2002:129) the interest to buy / to visit can

be identified by a number of indicators such as:

1. Transactional interest, a tendency for someone to

buy a product

2. Referential interest, a tendency for someone to

refer a product to someone else

3. Preferential, a tendency that shows an individual’s

behavior that has first preference of a product.

This tendency tends to swap the product in case of

something happening to the product.

4. Exploration interest, a tendency that shows an

individual’s behavior that is always looking for

information about a product that they are looking

at by finding the positives of the product.

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HYPHOTHESIS

Social

Media

Interest

to Visit

H0: There is NO significant impact of social media

towards the interest to visit Lake Toba

H1: There is a significant impact of social media

towards the interest to visit Lake Toba

3 METHOD

The research method that is used is qualitative that is

combined with quantitative with a descriptive

technique. The data acquisition was done by creating

a questionnaire and given to 100 visitors that have

been to Lake Toba.

4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

4.1 Descriptive Analysis

Based on the sex descriptive result, there are 53 male

respondents (53%) while there are 47 female

respondents (47%). The descriptive result that is

based on age shows that there are 92 individuals who

are in the age of 17-25 years old (92%), 5 individuals

of the age of 26-35 years old (5%), 2 individuals of

the age 36-45 years old (2%), and an individual of the

age of 45 years old (1%).

The descriptive result that is based on the

profession can be seen that there are 5 civil employees

(5%), 4 entrepreneurs (4%), 7 high school students

(7%), 83 university students (83%) and 1 other

profession (1%).

The descriptive result on how the respondents

knew about Lake Toba can be shown by each number;

66 individuals know or hear from friends and family

(66%), 5 individuals that have heard from

advertisement in printed media (5%), 16 individuals

that have heard from social media (16%), and 1 other

method (1%).

4.2 Hypothesis Results

Multicollinearity test

Table 4.1.

Coefficients

Model

Collinearity Statistics

Tolerance VIF

(Constant)

Social Media

1,000

a. Dependent Variable: The Interest

Table 4.1. above shows, the value of variance

inflation factor for the independent variable is less

than 10 (VIF < 10) and the tolerance value is less or

equal to 0.1 (tolerance value ≥ 0,1)

Significance test for partial correlation (t-test)

Table 4.2.

Coefficients

Model

Unstandardized

Coefficients

Standardized

Coefficients

Sig.

Std.

Error

Beta

(Constant)

Social

Media

4.761

.089

.617

.017

.472

7.717

5.298

.000

a. Dependent Variable: The Interest

The variable on social media gives positive and

significant impact on the interest of visit as seen from

the significance value (0.000) is less than 0.05 and the

t-value (5.298) is bigger than t-table (1.984)

Determination Coefficient Test (R

)

Table 4.3.

Model Summary

Model

R Square

Adjusted R

Square

Std. Erro

the Estimate

,472

,223 ,215 1,435

a. Predictors: (Constant), Social Media

b. Dependent Variable: The Interest

The value of Adjusted R Square is 0.25. Meaning

that 21.5% of the interest to visit can be explained by

Social Media. Meanwhile the 78.5% can be explained

by other factors that are not being identified in this

research.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The impacts of Social Media towards the interest

to visit

Based on the result of the analysis from this research,

it is known that the variable X (social media) has a

The Inﬂuence of Social Media towards Intention to Visit Lake Toba in North Sumatera

135

significant effect on the variable Y (interest to visit

Lake Toba). The tests that were carried out obtained

the significant value of 0.000 so that the significance

of probability < significance α is (0.000<0.05). This

can be simplified that variable X has a significant

effect on variable Y.

The descriptive result that is based on the sex of

the respondents shows that males are more willing to

make the trip than the female counterparts. If the

result is changed to age category, it shows that the

younger generation is more willing to take a trip there

in their free time. The range of the age, 17-25, shows

that most of them are still in high school or university,

where most of them travel when there are school

activities during the holidays.

The result of this research is backed up by the

result from Amalia (2019) that says social media has

a significant and positive effect on the interest to visit.

This research is also similar with what

Wicaksono (2017) has done that resulted in social

media platform, Instagram does indeed have an effect

on the followers’ interest to visit the place.

6 SUGGESTION

The government is strongly expected to provide the

need of young foreign visitors like Wifi in public area

so that they still able to access social media. When

they access social media, they tend to upload photos

that will also promote the site of Lake Toba.

To increase the variable on social media, the

regional government ought to provide many places

that are instagrammable so that the tourist are

triggered to take photos and upload them on their

social media.

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