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Abstract
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement ignited divergent social media reactions and conversations. Addressing the importance of message sources, this study aims to (1) compare audience reactions toward BLM content posted by brands and by influencers with brand sponsorship and (2) apply computational methods in influencer marketing to examine a large volume of social media texts qualitatively and quantitatively. A total of 32,702 comments on 110 Instagram posts on BLM were collected and analyzed through both human efforts and machine-learning algorithms. As a result, we found that black-influencer-created BLM attracted higher consumer engagement than posts by nonblack influencers and brands. Moreover, we generated seven different themes among which brands received the highest percentages of criticism, demands for more proactive actions, and purchase/boycott intentions. Influencers had more comments that reflected personal stories and emotion regarding BLM. Black influencers in particular received the highest percentage of praise and appreciation. Finally, comments on brands’ BLM posts embedded the highest proportion of negative sentiment, while those of black influencers’ posts were predominantly positive. Therefore, the comparisons of BLM sources elucidate the promising potential of influencers in communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages of racial equality—a topic which engenders high relevance to every individual in our society.
Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to our advisors, Dr. Hua Jiang, Dr. T. Makana Chock, and Dr. Qinru Qiu, for unconditional support and guidance. We are also grateful to Dr. Dennis Kinsey for giving us words of encouragement. Finally, we appreciate the editors and reviewers for their valuable time and feedback to improve our manuscript.
Notes
1 Noncelebrity influencers are categorized into four groups according to the number of followers, as their influence is rooted in their network size (Berne-Manero and Marzo-Navarro Citation2020; Campbell and Farrell Citation2020; De Veirman, Cauberghe, and Hudders Citation2017): mega influencers (1 million or more), macro-influencers (100,000 to 1 million), micro-influencers (10,000 to 100,000), and nano-influencers (less than 10,000).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jeongwon Yang
Jeongwon Yang (MA, University of Southern California) is a doctoral student, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University.
Ploypin Chuenterawong
Ploypin Chuenterawong (MA, University of the Arts London) is a doctoral student, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University.
Krittaphat Pugdeethosapol
Krittaphat Pugdeethosapol (PhD, Syracuse University) is a doctoral student, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Syracuse University.