Influencer Marketing on Social Media: How Different Social Media Platforms Afford Influencer–Follower Relation and Drive Advertising Effectiveness

Research on influencer marketing has grown exponentially over the past few years. Overall, the extant literature has been classified into three major clusters that examine sources involved in influencer marketing, message, and audience. However, there is a distinct research gap pertaining to how and why discrete social media platforms affect the effectiveness of influencer advertising differently. Theoretically, this research is the first to (1) map out followers’ gratifications pertaining to their interactions with influencers across discrete social media platforms and (2) explore how these varying gratifications and platform characteristics affect influencer–follower relation and subsequent advertising outcomes. In our current investigation, we take individual factors (gratifications) and platform factors (characteristics) into consideration. We demonstrate that consumers’ interactions with influencers are contingent on the specific affordances and characteristics of social media platforms. We find that the platform factors (characteristics) and individual factors (i.e., consumers’ fulfilled gratifications) positively correlate with the parasocial relation (PSR) between influencers and followers. The strength of influencer–follower PSR differs as a function of the platforms. More importantly, this influencer–follower PSR positively predicts advertising outcomes across different platforms.