Understanding the relationships between social media influencers and their followers: the moderating role of closeness

By Brian J. Taillon, Steven M. Mueller, Christine M. Kowalczyk, Daniel N. Jones. Journal of Product & Brand Management, 2020

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to better understand the role of closeness and the relationships between social media influencers and their followers, and, more specifically, how social media influencers can effectively manage their human brands. Design/methodology/approach Two studies were conducted to explore social media influencers. Qualitative content analysis and modeling with path analysis were used to analyze the data. Findings Results found attractiveness and likeability to positively predict attitudes toward the influencer, word-of-mouth and purchase intentions, whereas similarity only predicted word-of-mouth from the follower. Closeness served as a moderator but had different effects. Closeness positively moderated the effect of attractiveness on purchase intentions; however, it had a negative effect with similarity on purchase intentions. Moreover, closeness moderated the effect of likeability on attitude toward the influencer. Research limitations/implications This study was limited by the student sample as well as the students’ self-identification of a social media influencer. Future research should include experimental design manipulating well-known/followed or fictional social media influencers on different social media. Practical implications This paper explores the characteristics of social media influencers as well as the potential outcomes associated with influencers on social media. The implications for marketers and advertisers include a better understanding of how consumers engage with influencers on social media. Originality/value The role of closeness is identified as a moderator of consumers’ behaviors toward social media influencers.

Subfields: Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f6d7b5b86a9b037ff8ab3e0f795dc0d020393f8b

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In Marketing

1. Vrinda Soma
2. Jan H. Kietzmann
3. Patrick van Esch
4. Sommer Kapitan

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Vrinda Soma
2. Jan H. Kietzmann
3. Patrick van Esch
4. Sommer Kapitan

Citations in the corpus

• Influencer Marketing and Authenticity in Content Creation (2021, background): “Yet the growing body of inquiries is limited, in that they tend to catalog consumer attitudes in response to influencers (i.e., Taillon et al., 2020), or report how influencers manage their audience relationships and handle advertising disclosure (Audrezet et al., 2020; Evans et al., 2017;…”