How Supporting Talent Attractiveness and Content Quality Drive Engagement

The rapid evolution of digital social media marketing has heightened the strategic importance of visual representation and message substance in driving audience interaction. However, while primary creators often dominate digital branding studies, the empirical contribution of supporting talent physical attractiveness in relation to content quality remains under-examined. To address this issue, this study aims to examine the extent to which supporting talent physical attractiveness and content quality influence viewer engagement, both partially and simultaneously, on Hotman Paris’s Instagram content. Utilizing a quantitative survey design, structured questionnaires derived directly from source credibility dimensions were administered to N = 100 active Instagram followers selected through purposive sampling. Data were analyzed using Multiple Linear Regression. The empirical results demonstrate that physical attractiveness and content quality simultaneously exert a statistically significant influence on viewer engagement (F(2, 97) = 43.357, p < 0.001), accounting for 47.2% of the total variance (R2 = 0.472). Partially, content quality constitutes the primary driver (t = 7.256, p < 0.001), whereas supporting talent physical attractiveness exerts a non-significant partial effect (t = 0.828, p = 0.410). These findings confirm that while supporting talent attractiveness functions as an operational visual hook, substantive message utility remains the principal determinant of sustained digital audience engagement.