Social Media Influencers and Influencing
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item Examining the Influence of Issue Advocates on Public Engagement with Climate Change on Facebook: A Longitudinal Study (2014-2023)(2025-01-07) Yang, AimeiThis study investigates the climate change discourse on Facebook from 2014 to 2023, proposing a typology that differentiates advocates by issue niche position and temporal engagement. Analyzing over five million posts from more than one million accounts, the study classifies these accounts into twenty types and assess their engagement outcomes, measured by likes (low-level) and comments and shares (high-level). The findings reveal that while environmental groups are the most prolific and persistent advocates, they struggle to generate significant engagement. Similarly, government organizations and liberal political groups face challenges in garnering engagement. Conversely, politicians and celebrities effectively generate both low-level and high-level engagement. Additionally, academic institutions and science media excel in generating low-level engagement. The analysis also indicates a steady rise in conservative voices, with conservative political organizations, media, and think tanks increasingly succeeding in generating both types of engagement.Item Virtual Influencer Marketing: From Social Identification to Parasocial Relationship(2025-01-07) Yin, Guoqing; Pei, Yanli; Farivar, Samira; Wang, Fang; Wang, ShanThe role of parasocial relationships in social media influencer research has garnered substantial attention, particularly in the context of virtual influencers. Drawing from social identity and parasocial relationship theories, this research examines how followers’ social identification influences their perceived parasocial relationships with virtual influencers. An empirical analysis of survey data from 372 followers of virtual influencers reveals that both cognitive and affective identifications enhance followers’ perceived parasocial relationships with virtual influencers, with affective identification exerting a more pronounced effect than cognitive identification. Moreover, the type of virtual influencer moderates these effects, with the impact of social identification on parasocial relationships being stronger for followers of human-like influencers compared to those of non-human-like ones.Item Doug’s Effect: The Impact of Influencer Marketing on Community-Driven Online Auctions(2025-01-07) Ivanov, Anton; Hashim, Matthew; Tacheva, ZhasminaThe pandemic restrictions imposed during 2020 contributed to a significant shift of economic activity in online automotive auction markets. Yet, with vehicle sales going down in the post-pandemic period, online auction platforms are struggling to keep their communities engaged and active. One such platform (Cars & Bids) leverages Doug DeMuro, founder and social media influencer, to bolster user engagement and auction performance on the platform. To explain the effect of their “endogenous to the platform” influencer, we rely on the theoretical principles of resource mobilization and relational herding. We collected a panel dataset of N = 1300 vehicles auctioned from 2020 to 2024 and leverage difference-in-differences and coarsened exact matching to conduct our analyses. Our findings suggest that an endogenous influencer effect can significantly increase user engagement (i.e., viewership and commenting), as well as increase auction performance with a higher number of bids and higher final auction price.Item Narrative Persuasion in Social Media: Case Studies of Reviews, Discussions, and News(2025-01-07) Xiao, Lu; Zikre, Aadil; Karkhanis, YashNarrative persuasion is a well-acknowledged powerful strategy. Yet there is limited work that showcases the connections between the amount of narrative content in a text and its persuasive power. We measured and compared the amount of narrative content in texts that are considered to hold more persuasive power versus less. Our investigation focused on three types of online contexts: reviews, discussions, and news. Our results show that in online reviews and discussions, persuasive texts tend to have more narrative content, whereas depending on the topic fake news may not differ from real news in terms of the amount of narrative content. One implication of the findings is that human beings’ intrinsic need to connect and the lack of connection support in social media communications amplify the persuasive power of any communication strategy that attempts to fill that need.Item The Impact of Minority Influencers: Exploring Consumer Reactions to Social Media Content(2025-01-07) Pei, Amy; Zhao, Keran; Malhotra, PankhuriThis paper examines the impact of minority representation on consumer responses on social media. The authors analyze data from sponsored and organic content posted by both brands and influencers on Twitter. Utilizing over 10 million posts, they leverage artificial intelligence techniques to construct a measure of minority representation in sponsored posts by influencers. Their findings indicate that minority representation has a U-shaped effect on consumer engagement with subsequent brand-authored posts, suggesting that it may be suboptimal for brands to adopt a moderate approach to diversity in their social media strategy. Additionally, the paper explores the potential moderating effects of brand characteristics, such as public signaling of support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and brand popularity, which intensify the U-shape relationship between minority representation and consumer engagement. These insights can help managers improve their influencer marketing strategies.Item Social Media Impersonation and Verification Badge(2025-01-07) Huang, Zihong; Gao, Yi; Liu, DeDue to the increasing prevalence of impersonation on social media, the platforms have actively adopted verification badges to combat such an issue. To explore whether providing verification badges is an appropriate approach, we build a game-theoretic model to examine the impact of providing such badges on key stakeholders' payoffs. Our study reveals that offering verification badges can lead to unintended consequences. For example, we find that the platform encourages both creators and impersonators to purchase badges when the verification cost is low while discouraging badge application when the preparation cost is high. Surprisingly, providing verification badges can disadvantage the genuine creator by enhancing impersonator credibility, making it harder for consumers to distinguish between real and fake profiles, ultimately benefiting impersonators more. Additionally, consumers may be worse off when the influencers purchase the badge, as verified yet fraudulent accounts can more effectively deceive users, reducing the overall utility of consuming content.Item Introduction to the Minitrack on Social Media Influencers and Influencing(2025-01-07) Wang, Fang; Farivar, Samira