When less is more: the impact of macro and micro social media influencers’ disclosure

ABSTRACT

There are growing discussions of social media influencers and their effectiveness in endorsing products. Further, recent policy regulations are requiring social media influencers to disclose sponsored content when using a form of native advertising. This research examined the effect of macro-influencers (high likes) and micro-influencers (low likes) and their disclosure of native advertising sponsorship on consumer evaluations of products. Results from a 2 × 2 experiment first show that consumers exposed to the micro-influencer condition report higher levels of product knowledge, and consumers exposed to the disclosure condition reported the products endorsed by social media influencers to be more attractive. The results also show that when exposed to micro-influencers who disclose, consumers have higher levels of purchase intentions than when exposed to macro-influencers who do not disclose, as well as higher purchase intentions than for posts where sponsorship is not disclosed by influencers. The important findings of this research for theory, practice and policy are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media influencers
• native advertising
• disclosure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samantha Kay

Samantha Kay is a PhD student within the University of the Sunshine Coast Business School. Her PhD research focuses on native advertising on social media.

Rory Mulcahy

Dr. Rory Mulcahy is Lecturer in Marketing at the USC Business School, University of the Sunshine Coast (USC). Rory's research investigates the use of gamification and digital technologies to assist consumer wellbeing. His work has appeared in journals such as Psychology and Marketing, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Management, Journal of Service Theory and Practice, Journal of Services Marketing, Journal of Marketing Management, and Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services among others.

Joy Parkinson

Dr. Joy Parkinson is a social behaviour researcher. Joy has published her research in a variety of academic journals including Journal of Service Marketing, Journal of Service Theory and Practice, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Social Marketing, and Journal of Business Research. She has presented at numerous national and international conferences. Joy’s research interests include consumer behaviour, digital marketing, transformative service design for behaviour change in healthy weight management and more recently, behaviour change service design for minority and vulnerable consumers. Joy’s work includes co-creation of transformative services with consumers as experts and health professionals to develop programs that consumers will actively engage in. As such, she focuses on systems social marketing, systems evaluation, transformative services research, digital marketing, service thinking in social marketing, and social impact.