Simone Wies, Alexander Bleier, and Alexander Edeling explore the link between influencers’ follower count and viewers’ engagement. Influencers with few followers see high engagement, but as follower count increases, engagement decreases. They present strategies for optimizing social media marketing campaigns.
Andreas Lanz, Jacob Goldenberg, Daniel Shapira, and Florian Stahl introduce a forward-looking influencer marketing framework that allows managers identify and engage still-unknown prospective influencers in order to buy future endorsements.
Creators are challenging the rules of business. From bedrooms to boardrooms, they are redefining influence, money, and markets. This creative community is dismantling the old walls, rejecting the gatekeeping of corporations, and using platforms to launch its own content. Hemant K. Bhargava and Abhinav Kishore tell the inside story of the creator economy.
Jae Chung, Yu Ding, and Ajay Kalra reveal how personal storytelling, social connections, and emotional expression on social media can dramatically boost audience engagement, increasing viewer’s interactions and their perception of influencers as authentic. 1
Giovanni Luca Cascio Rizzo and Francisco Villarroel Ordenes explore how language that conveys enthusiasm and excitement in social media posts affects consumer engagement with micro- and macro-influencers. Drawing on field data and experiments, they reveal when and why emotional arousal increases or undermines viewers’ trust and engagement.
Xian Gu, Xiaoxi Zhang, Aashni Patel, and P. K. Kannan examine why and how mixing mega- and micro-influencers in livestream commerce can backfire, illustrating how managers can avoid this danger and design influencer strategies that balance reach, trust, and profitability.
Maximilian Beichert, Andreas Bayerl, Jacob Goldenberg, and Andreas Lanz show that influencers with small followings, despite their limited reach, produce a higher return on investment in direct sales campaigns than their larger counterparts. By linking the strength of viewers’ engagement to actual revenue rather than vanity metrics, they provide the first large-scale evidence that, in influencer marketing, bigger is not always better.
Fan Feng and Lingling Zhang vividly describe China’s unique system of influencer and livestream marketing, noting which characteristics and practices are distinct to China and which could be applied globally.
Barbara Duffek, Andreas B. Eisingerich, and Omar Merlo share insights from a global study on influencer marketing, revealing five properties that contribute to authenticity and suggesting six strategies that will help managers to align their stakeholders, build trust, and get the most out of influencer marketing.
Cristina Nistor, Matthew Selove, and J. Miguel Villas-Boas explain why micro-influencers are more authentic than celebrities. They also discuss how brands benefit from sponsoring different types of influencers.
Rakesh Mallipeddi, Subodha Kumar, Chelliah Sriskandarajah, and Yunxia Zhu explain how to coordinate influencer selection, posting schedules, and budget allocation. Making a distinction between short and long campaigns, they demonstrate how engagement, audience overlap, timing, and budget shape a campaign’s success.
There is an ongoing debate over whether mega- or micro-influencers are more effective. Zijun Tian, Ryan Dew, and Raghu Iyengar have developed a causal machine learning framework to evaluate the impact of an influencer’s follower count on how many times their videos are viewed. They have also found that the effect varies dramatically with the content of the video.
Meizhi Pan, Markus Blut, Arezou Ghiassaleh, and Zach W. Y. Lee explain which factors in influencer marketing drive both transactional and non-transactional marketing metrics and how managers can adapt their strategies to different platforms and products.
Jacob Goldenberg, Andreas Lanz, Florian Stahl, and Daniel Shapira show that managers and creators who build ties with nearby, low-status influencers outperform those who cultivate high-status influencers. This efficient means of expanding audiences uses the existing dynamics of social networks.
Daniel Ershov, Yanting He, and Stephan Seiler used a novel approach to identify undisclosed sponsored social media posts from text data, measuring the extent of advertising nondisclosure in a dataset composed of more than 100 million tweets. They found that over 96 percent of sponsored posts are undisclosed, constituting a pressing concern for regulators and practitioners.
Zeynep Karagür, Jan-Michael Becker, Kristina Klein, and Alexander Edeling investigated how different forms of disclosure on Instagram, along with the characteristics of influencers, affect whether viewers perceive a post as advertising, their trust in the influencer, and their engagement with the post. Their findings offer useful information for policymakers, marketers, and influencers.
Philipp Martin explains why themed communities like run clubs and book clubs are the next step in influencer marketing. He explores what this development means for brands and community hosts, as well as digital and physical spaces.
Li Chen and Andrew N. Smith explain how video influencers can increase their viewers’ engagement with sponsored content. They show that clear disclosure of sponsorships boosts this engagement, while excessive customization and subjective endorsements may backfire, undermining the perceived authenticity that makes influencer marketing work.
