The Power of Persuasion: The Key to Influencer-Follower Relationships

In only four years with the Sprott School of Business, Samira Farivar, Assistant Professor, Information Systems, is producing tremendous and breakthrough research in the social media and information systems arena.

Working under the SSHRC Insight Development grant, Samira and colleagues have made rapid strides with their research, having published four journal papers, with a fifth in the works. Their research provides highly valuable and unique insights on many untapped perspectives about social media influencer-follower relationships and the persuasive power of influencers over followers’ purchase intentions in a world that is quickly emerging as a very lucrative business platform.

The research findings reveal ways for influencers, business collaborators, as well as followers to maximize constructive engagement and foster healthy relationships—ultimately to help create successful business strategies and outcomes. Moreover, Samira’s research injects a novel sociopsychology lens that taps into the precarity of relationship management among and between followers, influencers, and the branding collaborators. 

The social media world as a business platform is both in its infancy and is becoming a key player as a marketing tool—a market that is currently worth over 40 billion dollars US—yet the emerging benefits and risks are still largely unknown. Samira’s research provides a three-pronged approach to unveil the perspectives and factors that form and shape influencer-follower relationships (with a concentration on those influencers that market fashion brands and services on Instagram). Analyzing survey and social media data, their findings provide a wealth of knowledge into the importance of follower social identity with influencers and how it impacts follower purchasing decisions. Being the first research to introduce the social identity construct to the influencer-marketing literature, Samira shows that having a sense of community—or belonging to a microculture—is a key variable that fosters a cohesiveness between follower and influencer.

“It’s about quality over quantity, so when influencers concurrently take care to be responsive, encourage peer interactions, engage in live stream sessions, and share more with their followers, they create a value in their relationships that builds the sense of community and ultimately greater “influence” over their followers purchase propensities and behaviours.” What’s more, Samira’s research reveals a novel key influential variable: Storytelling. They show that storytelling—as an approach to showcase a product or service—adds significant persuasive purchasing power by leveraging the positive effects of society identity. “Storytelling is so influential because it goes back to why people follow influencers—they find their lives interesting and want to know more. Personal connection is very important.”

Further to this work, Samira and colleagues are the first to integrate and compare the effects of opinion leadership (which plays a pivotal role in marketing communication as expert influencers in their field), and parasocial relationships (which exist when influencers have a one-directional relationship with their followers, such as celebrities with their fans) on influencer marketing outcomes. By exploring the relationships in combination, Samira and her team were able to identify the more salient value of parasocial relationships of influencers and their followers’ because it fosters a more personal relationship that ultimately positively influences their followers’ purchase intentions. This is key for both business collaborators to identify suitable influencers for branding and marketing as well as help influencers recognize and utilize effective relationship building strategies.

Currently little is known about followers’ addictive and problematic engagement with social media influencers. Samira’s research adds a third prong to the literature and first in the field to contribute to and further amplify the impact of the “dark side” of social media influencers. Samira’s research evaluates the engagement imbalance and emotional impact that can ensue when unhealthy relationships are established by followers to their influencers. It is both a conscious responsibility of the follower to become aware of their social media habits and its potential effects on their wellbeing, but as well, influencers can mitigate the potential of problematic engagement by first understanding how and why social identity is established and then utilizing the strategies to create and foster healthy user habits and community relationships.

Samira’s robust and ground-breaking exploration of the social media engagement context injects a highly valuable sociopsychological lens to help develop strategies that foster a knowledge-based and healthy relationship dynamic among social media users and their online community, influencers, as well as business collaborators alike.   

Samira Farivar is supported in part by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.