Researchers from Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, and KU Leuven published a new article in the Journal of Marketing that examines which social media influencers are most effective at turning advertising budgets into greater engagement.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing, is titled "Finding Goldilocks Influencers: How Follower Count Drives Social Media Engagement" and is authored by Simone Wies, Alexander Bleier, and Alexander Edeling.
With consumers growing increasingly wary of traditional advertising, influencer marketing is gaining traction on social media platforms such as Instagram and has transformed from an ancillary tactic to a market worth more than $13 billion in 2021. Social media influencers are conspicuous in numerous online spaces, with follower counts ranging from a few thousand to many millions.
Many influencers create content that generates social media engagement, which is captured by the number of interactions with their followers (e.g., likes, comments), a highly relevant performance indicator that advertisers seek to optimize. However, despite the growing popularity of influencer marketing, advertisers as yet do not have a solid understanding of how engagement arises, such as which influencers are most effective at turning advertising budgets into greater engagement. A main screening criterion is an influencer's follower count, or indegree, which defines the size of the audience an influencer can directly reach.
