Social Media Influencer Marketing: Commentary on the Special Issue

Abstract

The commentary introduces two research articles accepted for the special issue on “social media influencer marketing”. The first article elucidates the role of social media influencers’ attributes in affecting brand attitudes and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), whereas the second article illustrates how influencers decode and transmit organizations’ commercial messages to their followers. The commentary ends with a short discussion of emerging influencers such as virtual influencers, pet influencers, and metaverse influencers.

Keywords:

• Social media influencer marketing
• special issue

Introduction

Social media influencers have attracted much attention from companies and brands to create brand awareness, promote products, entice consumers to purchase, and create brand engagement (Bhattacharya 2022; Cheung et al. 2022b). Essentially, social media influencers are paid to post favorable social media content about a company’s products, services, or brands (Cheung et al. 2022a; Koay, Teoh, and Soh 2021). Due to a high number of followers, social media influencers can greatly affect potential consumers’ purchase decisions by spreading their opinions about the products and services of a company or a brand (Koay et al. 2022). Consumers are highly likely to follow the purchase recommendations of social media influencers whom they admire (Folkvord et al. 2019; Farivar and Wang 2022; Trivedi and Sama 2020). Instagram and Facebook are still the top two social media platforms for companies’ influencer marketing campaigns, followed by TikTok and YouTube (Santora 2022). The market value of the influencer marketing industry is expected to reach $16.4 billion in 2022, increasing from $13.8 billion in 2021 (Santora 2022). Such tremendous growth is partially due to the global lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic which has amplified social media consumption.

Research on social media influencer marketing is still at its infancy stage as many research questions remain unsolved given the constant changes in the field of social media influencer marketing due to the rapid advancement of technologies opening many possibilities (Vrontis et al. 2021). Hence, this special issue aims at understanding how social media influencers play a pivotal role in affecting consumers’ purchase decisions. This special issue attracted 13 paper submissions at the initial stage, and all papers went through a rigorous double-blinded review process. Two research articles showing strong theoretical contributions to the body of knowledge are accepted for this special issue.

Summary of the articles in this special issue

The paper by Dhun and Dangi (2022) aims to understand the impact of influencer credibility comprising expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness, and similarity, along with influencer-brand congruence on brand attitudes and electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM). 541 data were collected from Instagram users in India and analyzed using structural equation modeling to verify the proposed hypotheses. The results show that expertise, similarity, and influencer-brand congruence have significant positive impacts on brand attitudes, whereas expertise, trustworthiness, and similarity influence eWOM positively. The study suggests companies select social media influencers with the right attributes so that companies can be more effective in cultivating favorable brand attitudes and positive eWOM among consumers.

The paper by Vanninen, Mero, and Kantamaa (2022) attempts to understand how organizations plan and manage their influencer campaigns, particularly on the way through which their commercial messages are transmitted through social media influencers grounded in the two-step flow communication theory. To achieve the objective, the authors conducted a multi-method study, including semi-structured interviews with organizations and influencers and a semiotic analysis of social media content. The interviews involved 22 representatives of Nordic and Baltic destination marketing organizations and 4 social media influencers, whereas a semiotic analysis of social media content incorporated 603 Instagram pictures or videos along with associated text and 204 pages of blog posts. The findings highlight the process of how influencers decode and convey organizations’ commercial messages to their followers in the destination marketing context. Furthermore, this study shows how various forms of collaboration take place between organizations and influencers.

Concluding remarks

Although social media influencers will continue to play a significant role in affecting consumers’ decision-making process, companies should not neglect the influence of other types of influencers such as virtual influencers (Sands et al. 2022), pet influencers (Myers et al. 2022), and metaverse influencers (Jain 2022) as they are rapidly gaining traction in the advertising world. These emerging influencers will soon revolutionize the way how companies advertise their brands and products in the future. Further, when the metaverse is more developed and people are more mentally and technologically prepared to join the metaverse in the future, we strongly believe that more companies will collaborate with metaverse influencers for their marketing campaigns.