What Drives Engagement and Disengagement with Social Media Influencers?

Social media influencers (SMIs) offer marketers a new communication method called “influencer marketing”, whereby they can promote and connect brands with audiences through their narratives and content. The level of engagement between the SMIs and their audience is an important criterion to be included in influencer marketing campaigns. Accordingly, this research explored the factors that lead to engagement and disengagement with SMIs to provide insights to SMIs for crafting their marketing strategy and to marketers to understand what to look for in a successful influencer. The results showed that an SMI’s characteristics (authenticity, trustworthiness, expertise, social responsibility and legitimacy), content-related (informativeness and entertainment) and relational factors (parasocial interaction, influencer–self congruency, influencer commitment and role modelling) have a role in engaging with them. The results, on the other hand, also showed that there is no symmetry between what lead to engagement and what led to disengagement with influencers.

Keywords: Social media influencers; Influencer marketing; Engagement; Disengagement