The use of influencer marketing by
brands on social media
A study of the relationship between influencer marketing and
online engagement, focused on financial service
organizations.
Master thesis Name: Michelle van Gennip
Student number: 10021183 Date of submission: 29-1-2016
Thesis supervisor: Jim Slevin Graduate School of Communication
2 Abstract
Social media are known the fact that anyone can create, share and comment, and are perfect platforms to maintain relationships and to share knowledge. Some individuals are becoming influential by creating large networks and having a strong engagement with their followers. An influencer can alter the opinions of his/her audience, and this is also impacting brands. The growing new influencer community is exercising significant power over the perceptions of brands and companies, largely driven by the rapid expansion of social media channels through which influencers communicate. Therefore, brands are increasingly using models and strategies to steer the non-transactional behaviour of customers on social media and have a growing interest in using influencers in their marketing strategy. Influencer marketing seems to be especially successful for retail, food and travel organizations and less for financial service organizations, when looking at engagement between brand and customer. In this study it is researched how financial services use influencers in their marketing strategy and how this relates to the engagement rate between brand and customer, compared to retail and travel organizations that use influencers in their marketing. It is found, that there is no significant relationship between influencer marketing and engagement rate, and no difference in this relationship for the type of organization that is posting the influencer content. There was in fact a direct
relationship found between type of organization, type of influencer and the engagement rate between brand and customer. It is also found that the ‘type of influencer’ is a moderator in the relationship between influencer presence and engagement rate. The lack of significance might be explained by a few limitations of this research, like the way engagement was measured. Some scientists state engagement is more than just measuring interactions. Second, the success of an influencer marketing might also be measured by other KPI’s like ROI, mentions or Share of Voice. It is advised, for future research, to go deeper into the relationship between type of organization, type of influencer and the engagement rate between brand and customer.
3 Introduction
‘ In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive advantage is knowledge and engagement with customers’ (Cooperstein, Bernoff and Hayes, 2013)
Influencer marketing is hot! More and more marketers seem to have discovered the engagement of influencers in marketing campaigns. At the end of 2015, 84 percent of marketers had interest in launching an influencer marketing campaign in 2016, and 22 percent of marketers think influencer marketing is ‘the fastest-growing online customer-acquisition method’ (Ta and O’neill, 2015). According to Newman (2015), influencer marketing works: ‘Influencers may be marketing’s next “golden goose,” as people no longer trust ads, but they do trust people. More accurately, they trust a voice of authority’. There’s also a shift in the type of influencers brands would like to engage in their marketing plans: Brands are now starting to recognise the value of working with smaller and more niche ‘micro’ influencers rather than celebrity influencers to generate real engagement and resonance within targeted communities. Engagement is become more important than reach. It’s all about the relationship of a brand with its customers. This is also called ‘relationship management’ (Reynaud, 2016). Relationship management is focused on the long-term bond with customers. Brands managing influencer relationship management programmes don’t determine the key objective to turn influencers into customers, as the value of an influencer to a brand is not their wallet but their voice and their peer-to-peer influence and word-of-mouth power. So the aim of influencer marketing is on engagement and long-term relationships (Reynaud, 2016).
Some say influencer marketing can work for every branch and organization, if done right (Newman, 2015). But statistics show that food, lifestyle, and beauty brands had the biggest representation of influencers in 2015 (80%), where business industry had the smallest representation of influencers (17%) (Statista, 2015). Second, it is found that financial service organizations have a much lower online ‘earned media value’ than food, retail and travel organizations (Rythymone, 2015). Earned media value is measured based on the engagement rate between brand and customer. These findings raise the questions: ‘is influencer marketing less attractive and less effective in business organizations than in other industries’? Or are organizations in the business industry not as active and innovative when it comes to engaging influencers in their marketing strategy as other industries are?’ In the business industry, financial service organizations make an especially interesting topic because their customer engagement reputation, and their trustworthiness are very low valued by most customers (Longbottom, 2012). The lack of trust and engagement is for a large part caused by the financial crisis as explained below (Tonkiss, 2009).
The financial crisis that started in 2007/2008, also known as the global financial crisis, started in the U.S. where mortgages were given to people that could not afford it. The ‘housing bubble’ collapsed and as a consequence the American bank Lehman Brothers collapsed (Shiller, 2008). This event
4 caused a major wrinkle effect in the rest of the world, with an almost-collapse of the complete
financial system as a consequence. Governments all around the world had to save their banks and financial organizations from collapsing and causing bankruptcies for many citizens. With this major financial problems in the world, the overall trust in banks dropped: Headlines in the media concerned: ‘Home safe sales soar as trust in banks collapses’ (Knapton, 2008), ‘Bailout Beat Goes On: Europe Faces Banking Crisis of Its Own’ (Scott, 2008), ‘Financial Crisis: How safe are your pensions and investments?’ (n.d., 2008), and ‘Problem bank list keeps growing’ (Ellis and Luhby, 2008). At the same time, social media as a powerful medium rose.
Anyone can create, share and consume. ‘With the rise of social media, it appears that corporate communication has been democratized. The power has been taken from those in marketing and public relations by the individuals and communities that create, share, and consume blogs, tweets, Facebook entries, movies, pictures, and so forth’ (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy & Silvestre, 2011). Because of the increased opportunity of knowledge sharing, and the fact that anyone can create, share,
comment and follow on social media networks, influencers arise. An influencer is ‘an individual that can alter the opinions of their audience, resolve disagreements where no one else can be recognized by others as one who makes important contributions, and often continue to influence a group even when not present’ (Biran, Rosenthal, Andreas, McKeown & Rambow, 2012). ‘The emerging new influencer community is wielding significant power over the perceptions of brands and companies, largely driven by the rapid expansion of social media channels through which influencers
communicate’ (Booth and Matic, 2010). Brands have to make the choice: do they participate in this new world of communication with all types of influencing individuals or do they ignore it? Both choices have an enormous impact. Especially when there’s an issue rising concerning a certain brand and topic, it is crucial for an organization to act quick. Social media could be a threat, because bad news spreads quickly, but also be an opportunity for brands to participate and engage with its customers. (Kietzmann et Al., 2011; Sashi, 2012).
It is found that influencer marketing increases engagement between brand and customer, called customer engagement (Sashi, 2012). Because influencer marketing seems to increase engagement between brand and customer, and strong engagement increases trust in a brand, it seems interesting to research the use of influencer marketing by brands on social media, and the engagement between brand and customer. Financial organizations have lost a lot of consumer trust because of the financial crisis, and are still criticized and controlled by institutions and public. 32% of Dutch citizens said they still distrust banks (‘Nederlanders vertrouwen financiële instelling nog steeds niet’, 2014; Chin-A-Fo and Hensen, 2014). Customer engagement requires the establishment of trust and commitment, and only when this trust is realized, customers are likely to engage and become brand advocates (Sashi, 2012). Influencer marketing could be one of the efforts financial organizations take to engage with their customers more, and try to restore trust. But according to research, financial service
5 organizations are not as active as other industries with influencer marketing (Statista, 2015) and have a low earned media value on social media efforts (Rythymone, 2015). So question is: Do financial service organizations manage influencer marketing campaigns? And if so, how do they use
influencers as part of their marketing strategy? In this study I’ll research financial organizations and their influencer marketing efforts on social media, leading to the following research question: “How do financial service organizations use online influencers as part of their marketing strategy in their content?”
Online influencer marketing is an increased popular strategy for brands to reach and engage with their audience (Gilbert, 2015). Because of the modernity of the topic and the present-day popularity of social media strategies, this study has an obvious social relevance. For financial organizations it has become more important to engage with their customers, since they lost trust in the financial crisis (Tonkiss, 2015). The results of this study can contribute to the knowledge and online marketing strategy of financial organizations in which influencers can play a vital role. In this study financial organizations will be researched on the use of influencers in their online marketing strategy. This has scientific relevance because of the lack of research that is done on influencer marketing for financial service organizations, and the knowledge it will bring about the modern use of influencer marketing on social media by financial versus non-financial organizations. It will also give insights about influencer marketing on modern platforms like Instagram, which has only been up and running since 2012 (Stern, 2012).
Theoretical framework Social media and E-WOM
‘Social media employ mobile and web-based technologies to create highly interactive platforms via which individuals and communities share, co-create, discuss, and modify user-generated content’ (Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy and Silvestre, 2011). Social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the latest networks like Snapchat provide an environment for maintaining social relationships, sharing common interests and for posting, liking, sharing, or commenting on content (Kim and Han, 2009). Social media are known for the enormous amount of knowledge sharing that takes place. This is also called Electronic word –of-mouth. The phenomenon started as Word-of-mouth when there was no internet, meaning ‘oral, person-to-person communication between a perceived non-commercial communicator and a receiver concerning a brand, a product, or a service offered for sale’ (Arndt, 1979). Offline, consumers were only able to reach a small part of the population, and that kept marketers of organizations in control of the messages that were sent to the public. But since the rise of the internet and social media people are able to communicate one another
6 on a whole different scale. This can be confirmed based on the six degrees of separation theory, that states that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away through the friend-of-a-friend principle: ’I know him, he knows fifty people, those fifty people all know fifty different people etc. It is found that in 2011 there was an average distance of 4 steps on Facebook to reach everybody, and 99,1% is interconnected. The same numbers were found for Linkedin and Twitter. It shows that social media has made the world even smaller and the connection with everyone in the world closer. Because Social networks are real-time, they provide an easy accessible environment where information is spread much faster than in the offline world (Tuinsma, 2015). This also means that the reach of individuals and the number of connected others that they can influence, increases considerably by social media (Subramani & Rajagopalan, 2003). Social media have become very important as a source of knowledge and information sharing between individuals, organizations and other parties, and this also concerns products and services (Ferguson, 2008; Kim & Han, 2009; Subramani & Rajagopalan, 2003; and Bakshy et Al., 2011). Individuals that connect to more users than others, that share more content that’s relevant for his/her contacts and that interacts with their contacts more than others, these people gain ‘online influence’. The Internet and social media channels have created a world where everyone can be a news source, a thought leader, and a potential influencer (Brown and Fiorella, 2013)
Influence, influencers & influencer marketing
‘Overall, the ability to influence a large number of individuals, the minimal effort required to make influence attempts, and the flexibility to deploy a variety of influence strategies through information technologies are a potent combination making influence in online social networks considerably more compelling and pervasive than in conventional interpersonal interactions’(Subramani & Rajagopalan, 2003). Hebert (2013) states that influence is ‘the art of creating action’. This can be creating action personally, or on behalf of a brand. Influence is often equated to advocacy, but may also be negative, and is thus related to concepts of promoters and detractors. Organizations make it a priority to
increase the number of promoters and decrease the number of detractors (Reichheld, 2006). The individuals that act out influence, are called influencers. Biran et Al. (2012) Describe an
influencer as ‘an individual that can alter the opinions of their audience, resolve disagreements where no one else can be recognized by others as one who makes important contributions, and often
continue to influence a group even when not present’. An influencer has credibility within a group, persists in attempting to convince others and introduces topics/ideas that others pick up on, or support. These are forms of ‘personal influence’ that make someone an opinion leader. The important question is here, ‘what’ makes an individual an influencer? According to multiple studies, there are specific characteristics that make an individual a possible influencer on social media. According to Gillin
7 (2008), the most important reasons people give to evaluate a person’s influence on social networks are participation level, frequency of activity and prominence in the market or community. According to Biran et Al. (2012) the characteristics of communication that make someone an opinion leader are persuasion, agreement/disagreement, and dialog patterns. Overall, the ability to influence a large number of individuals, the minimal effort required to make influence attempts, and the flexibility to deploy a variety of influence strategies through information technologies are a potent combination making influence in online social networks considerably more compelling and pervasive than in conventional interpersonal interactions. As explained later in the theoretical framework, an influencer can be anyone (Brown and Fiorella, 2013). It may be potential buyers themselves, or may be third parties like journalists, experts, celebrities etc. (Duncan and Hayes, 2008). Internet-based social media tools like blogs, podcasts, online video and social networks are giving voice to the opinions of millions of consumers (Gillin, 2008), and even the traditional channels like television, radio, and print, are increasingly being influenced by online conversations.
So, because of the impact of online influencers’ opinions within their social network, either negative or positive, organizations have a growing interest in using influencers in their marketing strategy. Brands are increasingly using models and strategies to steer the non-transactional behaviour of customers on social media, by actively asking for reviews and feedback for example. Taken a step further, brands ask different kind of advocates to promote the brand online and offline, and to be part of their communication strategy to influence the engagement around their brand. This is called ‘influencer marketing’. Also explained in the introduction, influencer marketing is also called ‘influencer relationship management’ (Reynaud, 2016). Relationship management is focused on the long-term bond with customers. Brands managing influencer relationship management programmes don’t determine the key objective to turn influencers into customers, as the value of an influencer to a brand is not their wallet but their voice and their peer-to-peer influence and word-of-mouth power. So the aim of influencer marketing is on engagement and long-term relationships (Reynaud, 2016). In the next paragraph, online engagement rate will be explained.
Social media and customer engagement
‘Engagement refers to the creation of experiences that allow companies to build deeper, more meaningful and sustainable interactions between the company and its customers or external stakeholders’ (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2007b). Customer engagement has been the focus of many marketers over the years, parallel with the rise of social media. ‘The interactive nature of social media with its ability to establish conversations among individuals and firms in communities of sellers and customers and involve customers in content generation and value creation has excited practitioners with its potential to better serve customers and satisfy their needs’ (Sashi, 2012). Online
8 tools and technologies have made it possible to facilitate a co-creation between brand and customer. Social media made it possible that the classic relationship between brand and customer (Send-receive) changed into an exchange relationship. This non-transactional behaviour is likely to become more important in the future (Verhoef, Reinartz and Krafft, 2010). Like for example when consumers publish a brand experience on social media, this means customers add value by generating content and even become ardent advocates for the seller’s products and can influence purchase decisions of others in peer-to-peer interactions. Paine (2011) also explains that engagement is critical for three reasons: First, engagement is the first step in building a relationship between your customers an your brand, second, customer engagement helps promote and protect a brand and customer engagement can make your products better when you listen actively to the customer’s feedback. This is where
influencer marketing comes in (Sashi, 2012). Social media has given opportunity to create more open relationships between brand and customer, and by using brand advocates or influencers to increase this relationship, brands expect more engagement. This can be explained by the ‘Customer
engagement cycle’ by Sashi (2012).
The ‘customer engagement cycle’ shows the process of building customer engagement. The stages of the cycle are connection, interaction, satisfaction, retention, commitment, advocacy and engagement. Connection is the basis of customer engagement, meaning social networking and ‘following’ brands or customers. Once connected, the consumer can interact with brands, or other customers and vice versa by texting, direct messaging, emailing, blogging etc. ‘Social interaction in virtual worlds, for example, where users communicate and interact in real time can be used to connect with customers, provide information and experiences, and obtain customer input (Tikkanen et al., 2009)’. When interactions between brand and customer are satisfying, they will stay connected and work towards engagement. Satisfaction is seen as an intermediate to accomplish other goals like engagement. Retention may be the result of two things: first, an overall satisfaction overtime by the customer, and second a customer’s highly positive emotions, without having a long-term relationship with the brand. Commitment can be divided in affective commitment, which is emotional and a result of trust in a relationship and may lead to customer delight, and in calculative commitment, which is rational and caused by change in costs or a lack of choice and may lead to customer loyalty. Delighted customers may interact with others on social media and spread their positive experiences with a product or brand. But with loyal customers only if they develop emotional relationships with a brand, they will likely become advocates. Only if the above steps are taken and delighted or loyal customers become advocates, the foundation is layed for customer engagement. As engaged customers develop new connections, they become advocates for the seller in interactions with other customers and non-customers based on this statement, this makes the cycle virtuous (Sashi, 2012). Customer engagement consists of multiple behaviours, like WOM, providing customer ratings, sharing a brand’s content and blogging.
9 It is found that customers who engage with organizations on social media spend 20-40% more on money with those organizations than others (Barry, Markey and Brahm, 2011). Therefore, brands are increasingly using models and strategies to steer the non-transactional behaviour of customers on social media, by actively asking for reviews and feedback for example. Taken a step further, brands ask different kind of advocates to promote the brand online and offline, and to be part of their communication strategy to influence the engagement around their brand. Using people that have a large network or expertise on a certain topic, in brand content, is meant to increase engagement. In research it is implied that online influencers are generally seen as trusted experts by people, and therefore people will more likely like, click and read company/brand messages when an influencer is involved (Cakim, …). This is confirmed in research among marketing professionals, who indicated that ‘engagement, in one of the most important criteria to evaluate the importance of an influencer for a brand’s marketing strategy (Gillin, 2008). Therefore the first hypothesis states:
H1: ‘The use of influencer marketing on social media will increase engagement between brand and customer’
Type of organization & types of influencer marketing Type of organization
The focus of this study is on financial service organizations. Financial services refer to the services provided by the finance market. Financial service organizations are organizations that deal with the management of money, like banks, insurance organizations, investment banks, credit card companies and stock brokerages. Van den Berg & Hengeveld (2013) define financial services as the provision of services related to financial products by companies and institutions that have the power to. Service organizations an sich differ from product organizations. Service organizations sell performances, which are often labour-intensive, the service provider is often part of the service and product organizations sell goods. A service, contrarily to a product, can be defined by five I’s: (1)
Inseparability, a customer and service provider cannot be separated from the service and therefore a service is consumed simultaneously, (2) Intangibility, services cannot be touched but are often related to a product (waiter serving food), (3) Inconsistency, the use of a service is inherently subjective because every service delivery will be different, (4) Inventory, services have no tangible components and cannot be re-used, and (5) involvement, meaning the involvement of the customer in the service delivery process. Service organizations have to deal with certain internal and external factors that are important for defining a marketing strategy and to gain competitive advantage (McDermott, 1978). Some external factors are: (1) Intangible benefits; Some advantages of a service contract are hard to observe by the customer, so a favourable image relative to a customers’ future expectations can be critical, and (2) Diverse customer segments; Customers of service organizations tend to represent
10 many diverse buying processes as exemplified by government (national or regional), industry (heavy or light), commercial (retailing) and institutional (schools) buyers. Between and within all these segments, questions about who makes a decision, with what motive and at what time can differ greatly. Internal factors might be: (1) motivating employees; An employees’ performance, especially employees that have direct contact with the customer, represents the entire organization, and has tremendous responsibility to maintain or to improve. (2) productivity; Keeping track by increasing output is difficult for service organizations, plus the unpredictable nature of demand for equipment, can result in under and over capacity of resources and negatively affect productivity, and the last factor is (3) organizational issues; Service organizations are usually multi-leveled (headoffice, branche locations, etc) where field employees might be more focused on short-term, individual results and less on corporate long-term goals. It is important to align these values and goals because the field employee is in direct contact with the customer (McDermott, 1978). Considering the influential internal and external elements, it is important to set objectives and strategy, to manage this strategy and to measure performances.
Financial service organizations have had more difficulties than before gaining trust and engagement with their audience since the financial crisis started in 2008. The American bank ‘Lehmann brothers’ collapsed and this event caused a major distrust in banks, and overall in the financial system (Gros and Roth, 2010). Because of this distrust in financial service organization is seems that engaging with customers is difficult. This is confirmed when looking at influencer marketing and the low earned media value financial service organizations have. Because retail organizations, and travel
organizations show much higher earned media values on influencer marketing efforts, it is considerable that the type of organization has an influence on the relationship between influencer marketing and engagement (Rhythmone, 2015). Because this specific relationship is not yet scientifically confirmed, it will be studied as a research question:
RQ1: ‘Does the type of organization influence the relationship between influencer marketing and engagement between brand and customer?
Type of influencer
Like said before, anyone can be an influencer within the landscape of social networks like Twitter and Instagram (Brown and Fiorella, 2013). Influencers may be potential buyers or third parties.
Influencers may be customers with a large network that share their experience with a brand, be journalists that discovered a problem or misstanding in an organization, but it may also be artists that use their famousness to promote a certain product or service. These third parties exist either in the supply chain, like retailers or manufacturers, or may be value-added influencers, like journalists,
11 experts, analysts etc. (Duncan & Hayes, 2008). Traackr (2015) categorized all kinds of influencers into a twelve-persona overview based on three characteristics: Reach, resonance and relevance. Reach is the audience size of an influencer, the amount of followers the influencer has and how large his/her network is. Resonance is the amount of activity one creates, in other words, the engagement between influencer and followers. Relevance complies how relevant the influencer is to a certain topic, and how often he/she talks about it. The most common three forms of influencers are (1) The expert, who often has a high contextual fit, but not the largest network or reach, (2) The Journalist, that has a large public, and high reach, but is not specified on one topic and has an average engagement rate, and (3) The celebrity, who has an enormous fanbase, has a high engagement rate with its public, but is less relevant for a certain topic. Where Traackr focuses more on the authorities as influencers, Ferguson (2008) implies that consumers, who actively promote or detract a brand’s products or services are also important influencers for family, friends, and their online network. Because the opinions of
consumers about products and services of a brand are important sources for their network to trust the brand, on social media, it is important for organizations to create brand advocates (Barry, Markey and Brahm, 2011). It is also found that customer-to-customer reviews and opinions (WOM) are
experienced as more credible than other sources of information about a brand, product or service. Therefore consumers can play an important role as influencers (Brown, Broderick and Lee, 2007). An engagement strategy like influencer marketing is one way to create these brand advocates. Last but not least, an important type of influencer is the employee. Employees that actively promote their brand are also called ‘brand ambassadors’. Employees are the critical link between an organization and its customers, therefore it is of great value to organizations when employees demonstrate the value of the brand inside and outside the organization (Pillai, 2014). There are all types of influencers a brand is able to use in its influencer marketing campaign, so how do you choose the right influencer type? According to several studies, choosing the right influencer type and role in the content is of great importance for the success of an influencer marketing campaign. What kind of influencer is the right influencer depends on the type o campaign and type of company. Like Traackr (2015) showed in its overview of ‘12 types of influencers’, every type of influencer has its pros and cons when taking reach, resonance and relevance into account. For example, A celebrity probably has a large network, but less relevance to the product or service he/she is representing. To test this difference, a second research question is divided into part a and part b: ‘type of influencer’, and ‘role of the influencer’ and the relationship between influencer marketing and engagement rate between brand and customer. RQ2a: ‘Does the type of influencer influence the relationship between influencer marketing and engagement between brand and customer?’
12 When an influencer is identified like explained in the previous paragraph, how do organizations use these influencers in their marketing strategy? First of all, it is important that a brand develops a relationship with the influencer where trust is present. Like seen in the ‘customer engagement cycle’ building relationships with customers turns them into advocates. For influencers to be an advocate for a brand, this relationship is equally important. Second, when integrating influencers in a brand’s marketing strategy on social media, there are multiple practical ways to do this. By interviewing an expert and sharing this interview on social media, by using an influencer’s quote, by giving an influencer space on your social media accounts to do a Q&A, by showing activity of an influencer on an important event or by simply mentioning influencers in online content. To do a Q&A, for example as a bank, let people ask questions to a reliable well-known mortgage advisor on your social
platforms. Quotes and commentary of an influencers adds to the credibility of a social media post. Important in all these marketing solutions is that you know the market, the influencer’s priorities and take their interest into account (Hubspot and Traackr, 2015). there may be a difference between types on influencer marketing and the extent to which people engage with the produced content. Because this is not confirmed in scientific research before, this will be a second research question in this study:
RQ2b: ‘Does the role of the influencer in the post affect the relationship between influencer marketing and engagement between brand and customer?
13 Method
The required data for this study was contained by a content analysis. The aim of the content analysis was to explore how organizations use influencers in their marketing strategy, by analysing their content on social media and if this effects the engagement of the public with the brand’s content. In order to test the hypothesis and answer the research questions, I conducted two types of content analysis: First, I analysed the Instagram and Twitter timelines of four global organizations: Mastercard, Chase, Emirates and Coca-Cola between September 1st and November 30th of 2015. Second, I conducted a content analysis on the influencers’ timelines to discover their characteristics, job and the amount of followers they have.
Sample
The units of analysis are all posts of four company Twitter pages, four company Instagram pages and the profiles of influencers found in on the company Twitter and Instagram pages between September 1st and November 30th of 2015. Twitter is chosen because of the open atmosphere of profiles, and Instagram is known as an innovative platform, suitable for the use of influencers (Miah, Burd and Platts, 2013). Facebook and other social networks were excluded from this study because people tend to keep their profiles private on these networks, which makes it hard to look at influencer profiles in the second part of the study. Four organizations were chosen for the content analysis based on their reputation with influencer marketing and on the type of organization. The four companies have a reputation of dealing successfully with influencer marketing, and are able to divide in three types of branches: financial services, retail and travel organization. Coca-Cola for example has a successful influencer program called ‘my coke rewards’, in which engaging and loyal customers are rewarded (Mangold and Faulds, 2009; Constantinides and Fountain, 2008). Emirates had a successful campaign with celebrity Jennifer Anniston in their commercial and on social media in 2015 (Semigran, 2015). Mastercard scored in the top-3 best influencer campaigns of 2014, the ‘priceless surprise’ program (Goodwin, 2014), in 2015 Mastercard’s cross-platform influencer campaign featured a series of sponsored Vine videos alongside Arielle’s Instagram post and a feature-length video ad hosted on Mastercard’s YouTube channel (Asano, 2016). Last, Chase is proud sponsor of world-star Serena Williams, and in 2015 they worked with famous bloggers (Mosongo, 2015). Every post placed by the four brands in the three selected months on their timeline is analysed. The performed search resulted in 174 Instagram posts and 590 Twitter posts. Finally, of a total of 764 posts, 163 posts involved influencers (21,3%). The average engagement rate of all posts was 3, 17 (N=764). These posts are researched on different aspects of an influencer post, as presented in the codebook (Appendix 1). Next 29 influencers based on the criteria of an influencer, and analysed on the variable ‘the type of
14
Company/Platform Twitter Instagram Total (N=)
MasterCard (Finance) 136 43 179
Chase (Finance) 300 34 334
Emirates (Travel) 109 71 180
Coca-Cola (Retail) 46 25 71
Total (N=) 591 173 764
Figure 1: number of posts analysed for each company and platform (Sample size)
Company/Platform Influencer found No Influencer found Total (N=)
MasterCard (Finance) 52 127 179
Chase (Finance) 85 249 334
Emirates (Travel) 20 160 180
Coca-Cola (Retail) 6 65 71
Total (N=) 163 601 764
Figure 2: Number of posts that involved an influencer per company Process
The timelines analysed in the content analysis were accessed via Twitter.com and Instagram.com and were coded based on the codebook in Excel (Appendix 1). The first coded tweet and Instagram post for every company was from September 1st. The first part of each coded post contains the
demographic, information like ID number, name of the organization, platform, date of placement and general topic of the post. Then the independent and dependent variables were coded and analysed. Operationalization
The dependent variable researched is engagement rate, which is a ratio variable calculated based on the amount of interactions: likes, comments and shares. Socialbakers, a social media analytics tool, has developed a formula used by a lot of organizations: ‘likes+comments+shares/fanbase*1000’ (Socialbakers, 2015). The number that is calculated by the formula is called the posts’ engagement rate and indicates how involved people are with a certain post placed by a brand (Harper, 2014; Paine, 2011; Hoffman and Fodor, 2010). The higher the engagement rate, the better the posts scores on involvement of the public. To give meaning to the engagement rate measured on the timelines of financial service organizations, they will be compared to two other industry organizations that show high ROI on social media (Rhythmone, 2015).
The first independent variable that is analysed is ‘presence of an influencer’, meaning that for each post it is determined whether there is an influencer involved or not. This is done based on three criteria found in literature. First criterial is that there’s an individual named in the caption, if this is so,
15 second criterial is that the individual is either tagged in a photo/video or linked to her/his own profile in the caption (or both). Last criterial is that the individual has at least five-thousand followers on his/her own profile. If all these criteria are met, the post can be analysed as a post involving an influencer.
The second independent variable is ‘the role of the influencer’. There are eight types of influencer marketing determined in which the influencer has a certain role (Hubspot and Traackr, 2015). The options are: an influencer is being/has been interviewed, The influencer gives tips/tricks (to the customer), an influencer shares his/her experience with the brand, an influencer’s quote is used in the content, the influencer is active on a certain event, or a Q&A is done with the influencer. The seventh option is that the influencer represents the brand in a certain campaign or occasion and the last answer option is that there’s no active role for the influencer, the influencer is simply just named. It is
possible that an influencer has multiple roles in a post, like for example ‘the influencer is interviewed, shares a quote which is a trick to get fitter’, in this case multiple influencer marketing roles can be applied.
The third independent variable is the ‘type of influencer’. This variable refers to the profession of the influencer, or the activities that the influencer is known for by the public. Like explained in the theoretical framework there are different kinds of influencers that differ on characteristics like: the size of their network, the expertise on a certain topic and the involvement of their network with their content. In this study, seven types of influencers are divided: An artist/celebrity, an expert on a certain topic/in a certain branch, a blogger, a customer, a journalist, an employee or a sportsperson. The last type of influencer was added based on the findings in coding. If an influencer is not able to be placed in the above categories, it will be placed in the category ‘other’.
The last independent variable measured is the ‘type of organization’. Because it is found that travel and retail organizations have a higher earned media value than other branches like financial organizations, this could be shown in the difference in amount of engagement between these branches. Two organizations in this study, Chase and MasterCard, represent the financial service organizations. Coca-Cola represents a retail organization and Emirates presents a travel organization. So this variable has three categories that are being tested on engagement.
Results
Analyses of the data will be reported per hypothesis and research questions in this study. There were N=163 posts that involved an influencer, of N=764 total coded posts. The average engagement rate of the sample was 3, 17 (SD=6.42).
16 It was found that 163 posts involved influencers (21, 3%). To test the hypothesis ‘The use of
influencer marketing on social media will have an effect on the engagement of brand posts’ an independent samples T-test was conducted to measure whether there’s a significant relationship between the independent variable ‘influencer present in the post’ and the dependent variable
‘engagement rate’. Results show that there is no significant difference between the use of influencer marketing (M=2.82, SD=5.8), or no use of influencer marketing (M=3.26, SD=6.58) on the
engagement between brand and customer, T (761) =0.781, p= 0,170. Therefore we cannot assume that the use of influencer marketing on social media has a relationship with the engagement rate of a brand’s post. When researching the means, the posts that involved an influencer (N=163) had an average lower engagement rate (M=2.82, SD=5.8) than posts that did not involve an influencer (M=3.26, SD=6.58).
Type of organization on engagement rate
For the independent variable ‘type of organization’, a dummy variable was created for each category, in which the retail organization (Coca-Cola), the travel organization (Emirates) and the Financial organizations (Chase and MasterCard) were measured separately in a linear regression analysis to measure the moderation of ‘type of organization’ on the relationship between an influencer present in post and the engagement rate.
Although there was no significant relationship found between influencer marketing and engagement rate, to test any relationships, the independent variable ‘type of organization’ was tested as a
moderation variable on the relationship between influencer marketing and engagement rate. A linear regression analysis was performed. Two variables were included in the first step: The independent variable ‘Influencer in post’ and the independent dummy variable ‘type of organization’ (Retail =1, other=0). These variables did not account for a significant amount of variance in engagement rate, ΔR2=0,035, F (3, 759) =9.189, p=0.911. Next, the interaction term between Influencer in post and type of organization was added to the regression model. There was no significant interaction found. Next a second linear regression analysis was performed. Two variables were included in the first step: The independent variable ‘Influencer in post’ and the independent dummy variable ‘type of
organization’ (Financials=1, other=0). These variables did not account for a significant amount of variance in engagement rate, ΔR2=0,172, F (3, 759) =53.429, p=0.817. Next, the interaction term between Influencer in post and type of organization was added to the regression model. There was no significant interaction found.
A last linear regression analysis was performed for this moderation effect: Two variables were included in the first step: The independent variable ‘Influencer in post’ and the independent dummy variable ‘type of organization’ (Travel=1, other=0). These variables did not account for a significant amount of variance in engagement rate, ΔR2=0.108, F (3, 759) =30.697, p=0.434. Last, the
17 interaction term between Influencer in post and type of organization was added to the regression model. There was no significant interaction found.
The type of organization does not have a significant effect on the relationship between an influencer present in the post and the engagement rate, therefor, the answer to RQ1 is: no, the type of
organization does not influence the relationship between presence of an influencer and engagement rate between brand and customer.
Type of influencer marketing on engagement rate
To answer RQ2a: ‘Does the type of influencer influence the relationship between influencer
marketing and engagement between brand and customer?’ a linear regression analysis was performed with the independent variable Mod_V2= type of influencer*influencer present in post and the
dependent variable engagement rate between brand and customers, to see if there was a moderation effect of ‘type of influencer’ on the relationship between ‘influencer present in post’ and ‘engagement rate’. It was found that the moderation variable accounted for a significant proportion of the variance of engagement rate. R2 = 0.39, F (1, 154) = 6.281, p = .013. b* = .198, t=2,506, p =.013, CI [0.074, 0.628].
The answer to RQ2a is yes, there’s a significant moderating effect of type of the type of influencer on the relationship between the presence of an influencer in the post and the engagement rate. Note: it has to be taken into account that there’s no significant relationship between the presence of an influencer in a post, and the engagement rate between brand and customer.
To answer RQ2b: ‘Does the role of the influencer in the post affect the relationship between
influencer marketing and engagement between brand and customer?’ a linear regression analysis was performed with the independent variable Mod_V3= role of influencer*influencer present in post and dependent variable engagement rate between brand and customers to see if there was a moderation effect of ‘role of the influencer’ on the relationship between ‘influencer present in post’ and
‘engagement rate’. It was found that the moderation variable accounted for a significant proportion of the variance of engagement rate. R2 = 0.28, F (1, 157) = 4.540, p = .035., b* = .168, t=2,131, p = .035, CI [0.35, 0.933].
The answer to RQ2b is yes, there’s a significant moderating effect of the role of influencer on the relationship between influencer in the post and the engagement rate. Note: it has to be taken into account that there’s no significant relationship between the presence of an influencer in a post, and the engagement rate between brand and customer.
18 Additional analyses
There was no significant relationship found between the presence of an influencer in a post and the engagement rate on the post, but to further analyze the relationships between the moderators and the dependent variable, engagement rate, the moderator ‘type of organization’ was tested as an
independent variable on engagement rate by a one-way ANOVA that showed a significant difference between financial service organizations (M=1.33, SD=3.37), travel organizations (M=6.97, SD=6.09) and retail organizations (M=6.92, SD=9.01) on the engagement between brand and customer,
F(2,760)=77.371, p<0.001. Therefore we confirm the assumption that the type of organization has a significant relationship with the engagement rate between customer and brand, but is not a moderating variable between presence of an influencer and engagement rate. A Bonferroni post-hoc test revealed that the engagement rate of financial organizations differs significantly from the engagement rates for travel and retail organizations.
The second moderator ‘type of influencer’ was also tested as an independent variable on engagement rate by a one-way ANOVA which showed that there’s a significant difference between a
celebrity/artist (M=1.78, SD=4.42), bloggers (M=10.17, SD=8.03), Customers (M=0.13, SD=0.06), Employees (M=2.89, SD=5.27), An expert (M=0.61, SD=1.2), a sportsperson (M=2.56, SD=5.59) and other types of influencers (M=15.07, SD=12.59) and the engagement rate of a post, F(7, 148)=5.794, p<0.001. The presence of bloggers in a post, show a significant higher engagement rate than a post with a celebrity/artist.
Conclusion & Discussion
As we go back to the start of this article, it was explained that financial service organizations seem to fall behind on other industries when it comes to managing influencers as part of their marketing strategy. They show the least amount of influencers representing their branch ‘business industry’ (17%) (Statista, 2015), and the least earned media value on their online influencer marketing efforts (Rythymone, 2015). To research the relationship between influencer marketing and engagement, the type of organization and influencer marketing, it is tried to solve the problem of the lack of
engagement and trust between financial service organizations and consumers. To explain the low earned media value on their social media efforts and to explore what financial service organizations are able to change in their influencer marketing campaigns to gain more engagement and ROI. In this part of the study, the most important findings will be explained and discussed to answer the main question of this research and to give indications for future research.
Does influencer marketing affect the engagement rate between brand and consumer? In this study there was no relationship found between the presence of an influencer in a post and the engagement
19 rate of a post (hypothesis one). There was no difference in engagement rate for the posts that did involve an influencer or the post that did not involve an influencer. This finding is contrarily to research of Cakim (2007) who implies that online influencers are generally seen as trusted experts by people, and therefore people will more likely like, click and read company/brand messages when an influencer is involved. This was confirmed in research by Gillin (2008) in research among marketing professionals, who indicated that ‘engagement, in one of the most important criteria to evaluate the importance of an influencer for a brand’s marketing strategy. Engagement rate based on interactions is also the most common measurement for social scoring platforms like Klout, PeerIndex and previously Kred (Schaefer, 2012). There was no difference in this relationship by separating retail, travel and financial organizations, which was a research question based on non-scientific research of Rythymone (2015) and Statista (2015). These studies showed a large difference of earned media value and
representation of influencers for retail and travel organizations versus financial service/business organizations. This means that the first research question, that states that the type of organization has a moderating effect on the relationship between presence of an influencer and engagement rate, is answered with ‘no’, there’s no change in the relationship between influencer’s presence and engagement between brand and customer. A direct relationship between type of organization and engagement rate was in fact found. There are significant differences between travel, retail and
financial service organizations when it comes to the degree of engagement to a post. Financial service organizations Chase and MasterCard show a lower average engagement rate than travel organizations Emirates and retail organization Coca-Cola. This finding confirms findings of Rythymone (2015) that indicate that there’s a difference in earned media value on social media depending on the
sector/branch the organization finds itself in. Concluding, the engagement rate of travel and retail organizations on social media, is significantly higher than the engagement rate of financial service organizations.
Finally, there’s a significant moderating effect of the ‘type of influencer’ on the relationship between the presence of an influencer and the engagement rate between brand and customer. This means that making a choice on the type of influencer has consequences for the engagement rate of a post. The presence of a blogger relates to a higher engagement rate than the presence of an expert or celebrity, unregarded the type of company the post is from. This finding is a confirmation of the statement that was made in the introduction, saying: ‘Brands are now starting to recognize the value of working with smaller and more niche ‘micro’ influencers rather than celebrity influencers to generate real
engagement and resonance within targeted communities’(Reynaud, 2016). This might implicate that bloggers are seen as reliable ‘micro’ influencers, that focus on engagement more than on reach, and organizations recognize bloggers’ value in this (Trammel and Keshelashvili, 2005).
20 Practical implications
Even though, most of the hypotheses in this study could not be confirmed, and if they could there are important notes to be considered, the findings are not unusable. This study provides some practical implications that professionals in the field of corporate communication could use as guidelines in using influencer marketing. It seems that using influencers in brand content has no influence on the engagement rate of a post between brand and customer. This means that communication professionals should not focus on measuring engagement rate when using influencers in their marketing strategy. The measurements of a successful influencer campaign could be ‘ROI, sentiment of comments, buzz and mentions or other relevant measurements’, but focusing on engagement rate will not give insights on the successfulness of an influencer campaign.
Even though none of the hypotheses in this study could be confirmed, there were some other
interesting findings that are useful for communication professionals for social media campaigns. First, it was found that the type of organization; retail(product), travel and financial service organizations, does show a significant difference when it comes to engagement rate. Overall, travel and retail organizations have a significant higher engagement rate than financial service organizations. This confirms research of Rythymone (2015). Because there’s a significant difference between branches, corporate communication professionals in financial service organizations should not focus on a comparison of engagement rate with retail or travel organizations, but should probably compare their social media engagement results with other financial service organizations as a reliable benchmark. It is also found, in literature and this study, that the type of influencer is an important choice when taking engagement rate into account. Yes, celebrities have a large reach, because of their large network, but bloggers and experts seem to have more engagement with followers. This is not a specific finding for financial service organizations, but should be taken into account by any organization that reaches out to influencers.
Discussion
The problem that was stated in the introduction and theoretical framework of this study focused on the use of influencer marketing on social media and the relationship with the engagement rate between brand and customer. For financial service organizations it is found both in literature and the content analysis done in this study, that the engagement rate on social media is significantly lower than for retail and travel organizations. Second, it was found that there’s no difference in this low engagement rate for financial service organizations that use influencers, or financial service organizations that don’t use influencers in their brand content on social media. The lack of significant results might have to do with some limitations of this research, as explained below.
The dependent variable in this study ‘engagement rate’ is measured based on a certain formula, used by different social scoring platforms and social media tools. But some scientists argue that measuring
21 engagement on social media is not simply done by measuring the interactions of a post (Nair, 2011). There are two important reasons why so: First, measuring interactions of a specific post is a snapshot of the engagement between brand and customer, without taking into account that it takes time to build a relationship (Sashi, 2012). When a brand uses an influencer in its marketing strategy on social media, this often involves more posts than one, to first build awareness, and then slowly build a relationship with customers. In this view, not just one post should be measured, but a variety of posts within a campaign. This could also explain the lack of significant results of influencer marketing on engagement rate. Second, influence is not always measurable by direct actions. A large part of people that have seen a brand post, do not like, share or comment on it, but do have a certain awareness or engagement with it. This does not always have to show through a certain act.
Another limitation of this study is that only one specific part of influencer marketing is researched: influencers in brand content. Because the term ‘influencers’ is applicable to so many types of active people online (Bakshy et Al., 2011), there are many forms of interacting with influencers. Like said by Brown & Fiorella (2013) influencer marketing compromises different activities: marketing to, through and marketing with influencers. For future research it is suggested that the above named forms of influencer marketing are taken into account when testing the effects of influencer marketing, to apply influencer marketing in the full marketing mix.
Third important limitation is that only two social media platforms were researched. Future research would be more complete and diverse when other platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs are measured as an influencer marketing platform.
And last, only engagement was measured as a dependent variable of influencer marketing. Other important measures of the effect of influencer marketing are awareness and sentiment (Brown and Fiorella, 2013). By awareness meaning the mentions, news articles, social shares and media interest in a certain topic that’s put forward in brand content, and by sentiment meaning the positive, negative or neutral feelings towards a brand, post or text. Sentiment is measured by the ‘tone of voice’ of
comments and mentions by customers.
In future research, the above named improvements and points will make the studies on influencer marketing more valuable for marketing managers and influencers. Like said in the introduction: influencers are an upcoming phenomenon and social media are the most growing media out there.
Literature
1H 2015 Influencer Marketing Benchmarks Report. (2015, August). Retrieved October 1, 2015, from http://www.rhythmone.com/assets/pdf/RhythmOne_1H_2015_Influencer_Marketing_Bench marks_Report.pdf
22 Arndt, J. (1979). Toward a Concept of Domesticated Markets. Journal of Marketing, 43(4), 69-75.
Asano, E. (2016, January 27). The 5 Biggest Influencer Marketing Trends For 2016. Retrieved January 27, 2016, from http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/5-biggest-influencer-marketing-trends-2016
Bakshy, E., Hofman, J., Mason, W., & Watts, D. (2011). Everyone's an influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter. Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining - WSDM '11, 1-10.
Barry, C., Markey, R., Almquist, E., & Brahm, C. (2011). Putting social media to work. Bain & Company, retrieved January 1, 2016 from:
http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_Putting_social_media_to_work.pdf
Biran, O., Rosenthal, S., Andreas, J., McKeown, K., & Rambow, O. (2012, June 7). Workshop on Language in Social Media. The Association for Computational Linguistics, 1-9.
Booth, N., & Matic, J. A. (2010, June 7). Mapping and Leveraging Influencers in Social Media To Shape Corporate Brand Perceptions. In Conference on Corporate Communication 2010. Retrieved October 10, 2015, from
http://www.corporatecomm.org/cci/CCIProceedings2010.pdf#page=28
Brown, D., & Fiorella, S. (2013). Influence marketing: How to create, manage, and measure brand influencers in social media marketing. New York: Pearson Education.
Brown, J., Broderick, A. J., & Lee, N. (2007). Word of mouth communication within online communities: Conceptualizing the online social network. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 21(3), 2-20. DOI: 10.1002/dir.20082
Cakim, I. (2007). Online opinion Leaders: A predictive guide for viral marketing campaigns. In Connected marketing: The viral, buzz and word of mouth revolution. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
23 Chin-A-Fo, H., & Hensen, C. (2014, April 10). Gedragsregels voor bankiers, klanten bepalen
maatschappelijke rol bank. NRC. Retrieved January 1, 2016, from
http://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2014/04/10/klanten-gaan-maatschappelijke-rol-banken-bepalen-gedragsregels-voor-bankiers
Cooperstein, D. M., Bernoff, J., Hayes, A., & Ryckewaert, E. (2013, October 10). Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer. Retrieved January 21, 2016, from
https://www.forrester.com/Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer/fulltext/-/E-RES59159?objectid=RES59159
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) (2007b), “Beyond loyalty: meeting the challenge of customer engagement, part 2”, available at: www.adobe.com/engagement/pdfs/partII.pdf (accessed 9 March 2011).
Ellis, D., & Luhby, T. (2008, August 27). Problem bank list keeps growing. Retrieved January 1, 2016, from
http://money.cnn.com/2008/08/26/news/economy/fdic_banks/?postversion=2008082617
Ferguson, R. (2008). Word of mouth and viral marketing: Taking the temperature of the hottest trends in marketing. Journal of Consumer Marketing, 25(3), 179-182.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/07363760810870671
‘Financial Crisis: How safe are your pensions and investments? (2008, October 6). The Telegraph. Retrieved January 1, 2016, from
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/pensions/3144661/Financial-Crisis-How-safe-are-your-pensions-and-investments.html
Gillin, P. (2008). New Media, New Influencers and Implications for the Public Relations Profession. Journal of New Communications Research, 2(2), 1-10.
24 Goodwin, D. (2014, December 16). 3 Great Influencer Marketing Campaigns to Remember. Retrieved
January 1, 2016, from http://www.momentology.com/3935-3-great-influencer-marketing-campaigns-to-remember/
Gros, D. and Roth, F. (2010), The financial crisis and citizens’ trust in the European Central Bank, manuscript.
Kietzmann, J., Hermkens, K., Mccarthy, I., & Silvestre, B. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business Horizons, 54, 241-251. doi:10.1016/j.bushor.2011.01.005
Kim, E., & Han, S. (2009). An Analytical Way to Find Influencers on Social Networks and Validate their Effects in Disseminating Social Games. Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining, 41-46. doi:10.1109/ASONAM.2009.59
Kirby, J., & Marsden, P. (2007). Connected marketing: The viral, buzz and word of mouth revolution. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Knapton, S. (2008, October 9). Financial crisis: Home safe sales soar as trust in banks collapses. The Telegraph. Retrieved January 1, 2016, from
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/savings/3163645/Financial-crisis-Home-safe-sales-soar-as-trust-in-banks-collapses.html
Lovelock, C., & Wright, L. (1999). Principles of Service Marketing and Management (p. 414). New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Mangold, W. G., & Faulds, D. J. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business Horizons, 52(4), 357-365.
McDermott, D. R. (1978). A Service Organization’s Marketing Information System. Industrial Marketing Management, 178-185.
25 Miah, K., Burd, N., & Platts, D. (2012). The CMO's Guide to Instagram: Why Brands Must Be Visual
To Gain Visibility. Retrieved Novembre 1, 2015, from:
http://www.icrossing.com/ideas/cmos-guide-instagram-why-brands-must-be-visual-gain-visibility
Nederlanders vertrouwen financiële instelling nog steeds niet. (2014, August 19). Retrieved January 21, 2016, from http://amweb.nl/branche-724322/nederlanders-vertrouwen-financiele-instelling-nog-steeds-niet
Pillai, P. (2014). Employees as brand ambassadors. Paper presented at the Arab Health Congress, United Arab Emirates. DOI: 10.12140/2.1.1318.6567
Sashi, C.M. (2012). Customer engagement, buyer‐seller relationships, and social media. Management Decision, 50(2), 253-272. Doi: 10.1108/00251741211203551
Scott, M. (2008, October 7). Bailout Beat Goes On: Europe Faces Banking Crisis of Its Own. Spiegel Online. Retrieved January 1, 2016, from http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/bailout-beat-goes-on-europe-faces-banking-crisis-of-its-own-a-582607.html
Semigran, A. (2015, October 6). Jennifer Aniston Shows Just How Rich She Is In New Commercial. Retrieved January 1, 2016, from http://www.refinery29.com/2015/10/95285/jennifer-aniston-emirates-airline-commercial
Subramani, M. R., & Rajagopalan, B. (2003). Knowledge-sharing and influence in online social networks via viral marketing. Communications of the ACM, 46(12), 300-307.
Reichheld, F. (2006). The microeconomics of customer relationships. MIT Sloan Management Review, 47(2), 73-78.
Reynaud, D. (2016, January 22). 2016 influencer marketing top trends. Retrieved January 23, 2016, from http://www.itproportal.com/2016/01/22/2016-influencer-marketing-top-trends/
26 Ta, L., & O'neill, J. (2015, December 21). Influencer Marketing: Tips for a Successful (and Legal)
Advertising Campaign. Retrieved January 1, 2016, from
http://www.sociallyawareblog.com/2015/12/21/influencer-marketing-tips-for-a-successful-and-legal-advertising-campaign/?utm_source=Mondaq
Tikkanen, H., Hietanen, J., Henttonen, T. and Rokka, J. (2009). Exploring virtual worlds: success factors in virtual world marketing, Management Decision, 47(8), 1357-81.
Trammell, K. D., & Keshelashvili, A. (2005). Examining the New Influencers: A Self-Presentation Study of A-List Blogs. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 82(4), 968-982.
Tonkiss, F. (2009). Trust, confidence and economic crisis. Intereconomics, 44(4), 196-202.
Verhoef, P. C., Reinartz, W. J., & Krafft, M. (2010). Customer Engagement as a New Perspective in Customer Management. Journal of Service Research, 13(3), 247-252.
10.1177/1094670510375461
Appendix
Appendix 1: Codebook Contextual information
Variable Description Coding
V1 Code ID name of organization
(MAS/CHA/COC or EMI) + number of post + platform(I for Instagram and T for twitter)
Example: MAS001I
_______________
V2 Platform Is the coded post an Instagram post
or Twitter post?
(0) Instagram (1) Twitter
V3 Post text Copy the entire post text into the
excel table
V4 Picture/video Is there a picture or video placed in
the post? (For Instagram this will always be the case, so this is most important for Twitter)
(0) No (1) Yes
V5 Date of post On what day the post was placed? (DD/MM/YY)
27
variable that’s not really interesting for analysis, but for coders to maybe find a pattern. To code the topic is mostly a free interpretation, what do you think the topic is of this post?
Section A Defining an influencer post (for every Tweet/Instagram post)
Variable Description Coding
VA1 Indiv Does the tweet/post mention a person in the caption
by name(artist, blogger, etc. aka influencer)?
(0) No (1) Yes
VA2 Profilelink Is there a link (@....) to the profile of this person in
the caption of the post?
(0) No (1) Yes
VA3Tagged Is the individual mentioned in the post by name also
tagged in a photo/video? When clicking on a photo
on Instagram, a profile name should pop-up. On Twitter:
The named people in the circled area are people that are tagged in a photo or video.
(0) No, not tagged (1) Yes, tagged (2) The post has no photo/video
VA4Follow does the individual named and linked in a post have
at least 5k followers on their personal profile?
(0) No (1) Yes
If A1, A2 or/and A3, and A4 are all answered with 1(yes) go to coding section B. If not, end the content analysis for this post.
A1: Does the tweet/post mention a person in the caption by name(artist, blogger, etc. aka influencer)?
Section B Post & Influencer information (Define for every post placed)
VB1Typepost (1) What type of post is it?
There are four options: First, an activation post, which is a (convincing message to the consumer to take action, like go somewhere, follow an account, leave a comment etc.). Second, a
storytelling post, in which a story or situation is told/described:
(telling/describing/sharing a story about an event, person, or experience). Third, A product/service post: which is explicitly focused on products or services of the brand. And fourth, an empowerment post. In which advice is
(1) Activation post (2) Storytelling post (3) Product/service post (4) Empowerment post (5) Other, …………
28
given, tips, tricks and tools for the
customer/reader.
VB2Role What is the role of the influencer
in the post? This question actually answers which influencer
marketing type is used. Choose one of the following influencer marketing options on social media Option two mostly refers to tips and tricks influencers give
customers based on their expertise. Option three shows the experience of an influencer with a
product/service or brand as a whole. Option five refers to an event that may be organized by the brand, but may also be a partner at an event)
(1) Influencer is being/been interviewed
(2) The influencer gives tips/tricks (to the customer)
(3) Influencer shares his/her experience with the brand (4) An influencer’s quote is
used in the content (5) The influencer is active
on a certain event (6) Q&A with the influencers (7) There’s no active role for
the influencer
(8) Represents the brand in a campaign/on occassion (9) Other, ….
VB3Type What type of influencer is used in
the post? Based on the ten types of influencers by Klout.com,
influencers can be arranged in the following categories. Multiple
answers possible. You can find
this data by looking at the influencer’s bio, or at the role the influencer plays in the brand post.
(1) A celebrity/artist (2) An expert on a certain
topic/in a certain branche (3) A blogger (4) A Customer (5) Journalist (6) Employee (7) Sportsperson (8) Other,………… (9) Not clear
VB4Likes This is the first part of measuring
engagement: how many likes does the post have?
(number of likes)
VB5Comments This is the second part of
measuring engagement: How many comments does the post have?
(number of comments)
VB6Retweets Only code for tweets: how many
times is the post retweeted? For Instagram posts: skip this question and continue to VB8
(number of retweets)
VB7Totalinteract Sum of results VB5 + VB6 + VB7 (number of interactions)
VB8Totalengage Formula: Likes, comments +
shares / Number of fans X1000
