Why Social Media Influencer Marketing is more effective

Source: Ordinary Moves

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWYoLE7a0VY 

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bpkr91p2xY&list=PLDs0tNoNYTz1P3dO8m5Wdv0WE2lPTQSJm 

The economic principle I’m exploring is “people generally respond to incentives in predictable ways.”

 My research question to help me study the economic principle is “Why is social media influencer marketing more effective?” The article “Influencer Marketing: Why is it Effective” by Joe Ruley published in Strata Blue titled demonstrates this economic principle by showing how psychology, the TARES test and releventness contributes to a marketing campaign. 

First, social media influencers have changed the marketing game allowing companies to make huge profits when they don’t have to pay much for a large audience to hear about their products. Joe Ruley explained “A joint study conducted by Nielsen and TapInfluence shows that the ROI generated by influencer marketing is 11 times higher than traditional strategies”. I think this statistic shows how effective social media influencer marketing is because of the drastic increase. Also, social media sponsorships are more effective because of the psychology behind their following. Ruley also claims “Naturally, the opinions of members of the same group are worth more to people than those of a different group”. The followers of the social media influencers are dedicated watchers because they identify with them because their ages are similar.

 Second, according to Joe Ruley, “TARES stands for Truthfulness (of the message), Authenticity (of the persuader), Respect (for the persuade), Equity (of the persuasive appeal), and Social Responsibility (for the common good)” All of these factors are the main reason why social media advertising works so well. Influencers have credibility, trust and are perceived to be attractive to their followers. Since social media influencers are “real people” and not celebrities their followers have a huge amount of trust for them and their opinions. Ruley also states, “Credibility, attractiveness, and relatability are among the key indicators of an influencer’s ability to influence. And they can be explained by psychological concepts like social proof, attractiveness bias, and social identity theory”. Many influencers are attractive and most of their followers idolize them or look up to them. This means that their followers will purchase, if not consider purchasing a brand or product the influencer mentions.


 Third, social media is the present and the future and people want to feel like they are “trendy” and relevant. Joe Ruley reported, “Last year saw a whopping 12.9 million brand sponsored influencer posts. And that number is estimated to double in 2018, creating an estimated market size of nearly $1.7 billion”. This demonstrated how marketing using social media influencers is becoming a trend itself among companies. For example, the company honey is a company that allows consumers to get discounts online for free. I did not have to do any research for this project to know what honey is because I personally remembered hearing about it in Shane Dawson and Emma Chamberlain YouTube videos. Companies like honey are getting tens of millions of views when they use social media influencers like Shane and Emma. Honey knew that Shane’s series about Jake Paul was going to be very popular so they reached out to Shane to and sponsored that video which got 22,728,769 views. Honey probably paid Shane a lot in order to get their name in his video but they didn’t spend $500,000 like they would have if the put an ad on TV. Social media influencer marketing is effective and gets results that any other ad wouldn’t.