Consumer Engagement in Influencer Marketing Video Campaigns: An Abstract

Abstract

The amount of videos users watch on social media platforms, such as Instagram and TikTok, has almost doubled since 2018 (Hayes, 2022). In marketing, videos are an increasingly successful means for brand to engage with consumers, with several studies finding that video content leads to more consumer engagement (i.e., liking, commenting, or sharing) than text content, which affects brand attitudes and purchase intentions (e.g., Li & Xie, 2020). Social media influencers generate a significant amount of video content online, while many brands spend at least 10% of their yearly marketing budget on influencer marketing (Geyser, 2021). However, there is a gap in research investigating the key characteristics in influencer posts that lead to engagement, particularly when it comes to video rather than textual content. In short, there is a need for more understanding about how best to design video content that engages customers. With this in mind, we explore how video characteristics in influencer marketing campaigns affect consumer engagement (in the form of liking and commenting). Specifically, we ask: (1) how emotional facial expressions in video content, and (2) corresponding post descriptions (i.e., textual cues) affect consumer engagement with influencers’ social media posts. To answer our research questions, we collected 2,376 social media posts from Instagram that were published from 1,240 influencers in partnership with 145 brands across ten product categories, such as apparel, beauty, and technology. All videos were analysed using Schwenzow et al.’s (2020) video tool that enables researchers to analyse a broad range of video characteristics on a large scale. The post descriptions were analysed with Language Inquiry Word Count (LIWC-22). LIWC is a text-analytics software (Tausczik & Pennebaker, 2010) that uses dictionaries to calculate the degree to which each piece of text contains specific category words, such as first-person pronouns or emotional words (e.g., happy, cried, nice, ugly). Our results show that, compared to neutral facial expressions, emotional facial expressions in the video are negatively associated with engagement. On the contrary, we find that emotionality in the post description is positively associated with engagement. Finally, our findings suggest a significant moderation effect of product category (hedonic vs. utilitarian) on the relationship between emotionality in the post description and engagement. Theoretically, drawing on an interplay of theories including emotional contagion theory and heuristic-systematic model of information processing, we shed light on the nature of the relationship between social media post characteristics and consumer engagement in an influencer context. Practically, we provide advice on how a popular form of marketing content, video, can be used in an increasingly popular marketing context; influencer marketing.