The role of influencer marketing in social media brand community development
(A2026-132955)

AUTHORS

Kseniya Stsiampkouskaya, University of Bath; Lukasz Piwek, University of Bath; Carl-Philip Ahlbom, University of Bath

ABSTRACT

Brands increasingly use social media to communicate with consumers and establish their own communities. However, incentivising and maintaining consumer participation is challenging. To address this, brands collaborate with influencers to stimulate user engagement on their brand pages, but the effectiveness of this approach is underexplored. To investigate the effects of influencer marketing on user behaviour on a branded social media page, we collected longitudinal data from a large social media brand account and examined the role of brand-influencer collaborations in the establishment and development of a social media brand community.