Here Comes the Social Media Influencers
Link: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/127010
The research paper “Study on social media marketing campaign strategy—TikTok and Instagram” written by Jessie Boxin Mou in 2020 analyzes the role of developing social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram in changing the market dynamics. Using the research results, Mou provides companies with recommendations regarding how to develop their social media strategies. Although the main topic is about social media, I think its theme is closely related to Information Networks and Network Dynamics.
With the rapid development of technology, there is the World Wide Web, where the use of the network structure brings forth the globalizing power of the Webs by allowing any person authoring a Web page to highlight the relationship with other pages regardless of your physical location. Social media are the main production of such phenomena. On TikTok, Instagram, and many other platforms, people can interact with one another by sharing and consuming information using these web-based communication tools. From people using it daily, many celebrities and political figures also started to use social media as the new communication tool to spread their messages and news. Furthermore, these social media created new job opportunities for content creators and influencers, who can connect with the audience, express their opinions on specific brands or products, and influence their audience’s thoughts and behaviors.
This is an example of sponsored content on TikTok where Jiaqi Li is the KOL and he is doing a marketing campaign for the beauty brand Huaxizi.
In the research paper, Mou compared consumers’ different reactions to content marketing, sponsored content together with user-generated content. The section of the comparative analysis is relevant to the concepts of sponsored search markets, where advertisements are placed on websites and matched to different locations with various pricing for exposure and marketing purposes. The two most famous procedure and auction for advertisements are the VCG Principle and the Generalized Second Price Auction. This is slightly different from social media because social media platforms not only have advertisements displayed on the pages but also have sponsored content, which is “the intentional incorporation of brands, products, or persuasive messages into traditionally non-commercial, editorial content (Mou 2020).” For sponsored content, the brands or companies pay different amounts of money to influencers based on their content statistics, including the number of their followers, views, likes, and purchasing results. They can also pay a certain amount of money to the platform to display their posts on more people’s search page or main page, which could increase their influence, showing how advertising is tied to search behavior and how it generates a matching market.
Although brands invest a generous amount of money on influencers and social media platforms, the research found that the quality of those sponsored content will affect viewers’ emotions and feedback greatly. For instance, an influencer is perceived as less credible if they purposedly choose not to disclose that the content shared is sponsored. Moreover, comparing to user-generated content, sponsored content has a more negative influence on the brand image. While these reactions are related to psychology and social behaviors, they have a tremendous impact on the later development of those contents based on the research regarding customer reviews. The research indicated how posts can go viral or go “extinct” with the concept of Information Cascades. People are more likely to click into posts with already a lot of likes and views instead of empty posts, thus creating polarization on social media. At the same time, the researcher also noticed how customers are likely to purchase products with a mix of positive and negative reviews than products have either positive or negative reviews because they can use their personal judgments to decide thus engage more with the content.
Marketing on social media is complicated because people form small communities and groups on such networks and advertisement has different ways of display on the platforms, generating different reactions and results. The research gives insights on how social media influencers and companies can have wiser marketing strategies to generate greater influence. It is worth noticing that although human behaviors are complex and unpredictable, there are still ways to find patterns in the World Wide Web. As customers and “nodes” of these complex networks, we should also be aware of various contents and judge them more critically before making important decisions.