Influencer marketing : the impact of the number of followers on influencer’s likability for young Instagram users

• Autor(a) principal: Coelho, Rita Magalhães Moreira
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/28568
• topic: Influencer marketing; Number of followers; Number of followees; Young Instagram users; Ascribed opinion leadership; Número de seguidores; Número de contas a seguir; Utilizadores jovens do Instagram; Poder de opinião; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Understanding how customers respond to influencer marketing has become a priority for companies, since the impact of digital marketing in today’s world is undeniable. The main goal of this research is to study how young Instagram users perceive the number of followers and followees of an influencer in terms of his/her overall likability and, if the influencer’s ascribed opinion leadership works as a mediator of this relationship. In order to do so, we administered a questionnaire to young Instagram users between 18 and 34 years old, since 65% of Instagram users belong to this age group. Specifically, we created two fictitious influencers Instagram accounts, one female and one male, and manipulated the number of followers and followees. The responses of 672 people were analyzed with SPSS and AMOS, all of which Portuguese Instagram users (370 women and 301 men). The results show that the number of followers negatively affects influencer’s likability, even though this relation does not exist when the influencer’s ascribed opinion leadership is not controlled. In addition, we found that the number of people followed by the influencer is also an important variable to take into consideration: if it is low, the influencer’s likability is negatively affected by the number of followers, but, if it is high, this negative effect does not occur. Evidence that women are more influenced by Instagram’ influencers than men was also found. On the whole, this study sheds light into the characteristics that an Instagram influencer must have in order to increase his/her likability, as well as on how consumers demographic features and Instagram usage might affect their response to influencer marketing. An important contribution of this research is linked with the finding that micro-influencers (number of followers below 100K) seem to be more likable and, thus, more attractive for companies and marketing agencies.