INTRODUCTION:

In 2008, Duncan Brown and Nick Hayes published the book Influencer Marketing in which they defined influencer marketing as “a new approach to marketing, important because sales forces both understand and support it. It directly addresses the most common sales barriers within prospective customers and focuses attention on those individuals who advise decision-makers. We call these people influencers, and they are as crucial to the sales process as the prospects themselves.” Mentions of influencers can be traced back to blog platforms in 2005, which then rapidly spread to other social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube (Borchers, 2019). It’s true, influencers are crucial, but influencer marketing is no longer a new approach to marketing, instead, the process is now a mainstream form of online marketing.

Definitions of the terms influencer and influencer marketing have evolved dramatically over the last decade. Werner Geyser, founder of Influencer Marketing Hub, defines influencer marketing as a hybrid of old and new marketing tools, taking the idea of celebrity endorsement and placing that idea into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign. In influencer marketing, campaigns involve collaborations between brands and influencers. More importantly, influencer marketing does not simply apply to the efforts of celebrities, but more so revolves around influencers who would not consider themselves famous offline. Influencer Marketing Hub reports influencers are defined by two characteristics: someone with the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of their authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with their audience, and someone with a following in a distinct niche, with whom they actively engage. The size of an influencer’s following further defines them, Common categories of influencers are listed as: micro-influencers (up to 10,000 followers), meso-influencers (10,000 to 1 million followers), and macro-influencers (more than 1 million followers) (Boerman, 2020). 

Research into influencers and influencer marketing has grown rapidly. Studies have revealed that social media audiences consider recommendations from influencers to be more trustworthy than traditional advertising and celebrity endorsements (Ye et al., 2021), (Schouten et al., 2019).

This project was designed to answer the following research questions:

R1: How is an influencer created?

R2: How does an influencer operate?

R3: What is key to an influencer’s audience growth?

To conduct this project, I completed extensive research on how an influencer is defined and why influencer marketing has seen such success. To accompany my research, I conducted five interviews with five individual micro-influencers using predominantly Instagram and TikTok. From these interviews I established common themes regarding their beginnings, operation, success, and attitudes on brand deals. I conducted an additional interview with a client solutions manager at TikTok where I gathered information on the manner in which influencers successfully promote brands in a saturated market.

From my research and interviews, I compiled the information gathered to present on a website that serves as the distribution platform for my findings. To present my findings, I have completed two articles intended for publishing on The University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media site: NewsLab.org. The first article titled “Types of Influencers: Celebrity Impact,” discusses the different categories of influencers, breaking them up into two main groups: celebrities and non-celebrity content creators. The article explores how influencers are created and why influencers are more effective brand ambassadors than celebrities. The second article titled “Are Influencer Promotions Authentic? dives into the interviews I conducted with the five micro-influencers, focusing on their attitudes toward choosing which brands to promote. In this article, I completed a content analysis of a macro-influencer and her brand promotions on Instagram to compare common themes found in my interviews with the actual practices of influencers on social media.

Additionally, I created two videos to further explore the two subjects covered in the articles mentioned above. In these videos, I present the five influencers I interviewed and showcase their views on content and brand promotions. Finally, I created an audio piece that discusses influencer marketing and dives into my interview with the client solutions manager at TikTok, which furthers the conversation on influencer operation, success, and future shifts in the industry.