Is love really blind?: platform and influencer engagement

Abstract

With the advent of the internet and social media, a new form of endorsements, influencer marketing, has gained prevalence. With the aid of social media platforms, these influencers are more relatable than celebrities as they are perceived to be more identifiable, approachable, and have a higher level of expertise. The influencers’ persuasion is dependent on their attractiveness and knowledge expertise in a domain. The platforms are identified to provide content-based or profile based advantages to the influencers for driving engagement. Thus, the research was conducted to study the effect of influencers’ success through the short term (watch, like, comment, share, check profile) and the long-term (follow/subscribe) reactions. A strong preference was observed for Attractive Female and Expert Male profiles on the profile-based platforms on exposure to same-gender profiles on different platforms with the same content offering, corresponding to existing societal biases. The content-based platform was found to be more successful for experts irrespective of gender. The expert female was recognized as a new profile offering concerning no significant preference towards either platform for engaging with the profile.