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Abstract

This empirical research investigated the structural relationships between social media influencer attributes, perceived friendship, psychological well-being, loyalty, and perceived social responsibility of influencers, focusing on the perspective of social media users. More specifically, this study conceptually identified social media influencer attributes such as language similarity, interest similarity, interaction frequency, and self-disclosure and examined the respective effects of each dimension on perceived friendship and psychological well-being, consequently resulting in loyalty toward social media influencers. The authors collected and analyzed data from 388 social media users in the United States via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk with multivariate analyses to test the hypothesized associations among the variables in this study. The findings indicated that perceived friendship was significantly influenced by language similarity, interest similarity, and self-disclosure, but did not have a significant impact on psychological well-being. Additionally, perceived friendship significantly affected psychological well-being and loyalty, and psychological well-being significantly influenced loyalty. Lastly, social media influencers’ social responsibility moderated the path from psychological well-being to loyalty. Based on these findings, this study proposes theoretical and managerial implications for the social media influencer marketing context.

۱٫ Introduction

Social media use is widespread and has been shown to play an important role in the lives of both adolescents and young adults [1]. Social media platforms enable adolescents and young adults to consume digital content without time and space limits and to virtually interact with other users without geographical boundaries [2]. Particularly, the development of digital platforms leads young adults to closely interact with their favorite celebrities, brands, and other users in the virtual world via two-way communication tools, such as live chats and comment options [3]. Interestingly, as social media platforms have grown, the digital world created a new phrase, “social media influencers,” who become famous through their digital content on social media, compared to traditional celebrities who become famous on TV shows and film [4]. Hence, social media users tend to feel connected with social media influencers by interacting with them in the virtual world and perceive social media influencers as more authentic in their fields, including fashion, health, or music, than celebrity endorsements in traditional advertisements [1]. Therefore, there is a need to empirically investigate what drives social media users’ loyalty toward their favorite influencers, such as repeat purchase behavior, positive word-of-mouth, and recommendation of products advertised by social media influencers from the perspectives of an influencer’s digitalized attributes [5,6]. These perspectives are especially important because social media users interact with their favorite influencers in the digital world instead of in the real world. This means that social media influencers’ digitalized attributes can be more important determinants of users’ perceptions, feelings, behavioral intention, and even actual behaviors than the visual characteristics of social media influencers. However, prior research in this field focused primarily on the visual and/or actual characteristics of social media influencers (e.g., physical attractiveness or social attractiveness) to predict marketing outcomes, such as positive attitudes toward and favorable intention for a product advertised by the influencers [7]. In particular, loyalty toward social media influencers leads followers to have a strong sense of product/brand association and reality by perceiving influencers’ product/brand and advertisements as more persuasive and authentic [4]. Accordingly, users are more likely to behave favorably for the product/brand social media influencers advertise in order to endorse the influencers and support the influencers’ fame and social status [7].