Are Influencers Actually More Influential?

Influencer

Source: geralt/pixabay

Influencers, by name, have powerful influences on what we believe and how we live. They have a substantial number of active followers online and frequently create content to engage their audience. Their posts often receive enthusiastic endorsements, and their recommendations guide their followers' opinions, behaviors, and decisions. They now even have reserved seats at the White House press briefings, representing non-traditional media or “new media.”

Are posts by influencers more memorable?

We ask the question: Is the content created and shared by social media influencers more memorable? This is important because the information we remember can later influence our beliefs and decision-making. We are particularly interested in two key features that characterize influencers, namely, having large numbers of followers and creating content that receives large numbers of likes. These two features, or social endorsement cues, signal collective approval, power, and social status. They enhance the perceived value and credibility of the posted information and boost trust and popularity associated with influencers.

Social endorsement cues have been shown in real life to facilitate memory, as people often pay greater attention to information that they deem more important or credible, such as that from a high-status person or an expert. For instance, research has shown that people are more attentive to and thus better remember information shared by their boss than a co-worker, or information shared by a professor than a student. Would it be the same case for information shared by social media influencers, given that online social endorsement cues (e.g., followers and likes) flag out their social approval, credibility, and status?

An empirical test

We conducted a series of four experiments to answer this question. We tested memory for information about COVID-19 in a simulated Twitter (X) environment—the platform where users frequently disseminate health-related information—and memory for personal experiences in a simulated Facebook environment—a popular site for sharing personal stories. Participants first read posts shared by users with large and small numbers of social endorsement cues (i.e., followers or likes; See examples below.). Then, in two surprise memory tests, they were asked to recall information from the posts they had just viewed and complete a multiple-choice recognition task. Participants also rated the user profiles later on their popularity, trustworthiness, likability, and attractiveness.

Surprisingly, across all four experiments, participants did not remember information posted by influencers (who have large numbers of followers or whose posts received large numbers of likes) better than by regular users, even though they rated influencers as more popular, more trustworthy, more likable, and more attractive. The findings were consistent across recall and recognition, regardless of participants’ cultural background or general social conformity tendency. Thus, influencers do not show an advantage in influencing people’s memory for their content creation online.

Example tweets

Source: Bilgin&Wang

Example Facebook status updates

Source: Bilgin/Wang

Take-home messages

Influencers have a significant influence on their followers, even though their content creation is not remembered better than other information. This suggests that the power of influencers rests upon a heuristic processing where people make quick endorsements on information shared by their idols instead of engaging in thorough analysis of the information to form an opinion. In other words, our judgments, behaviors, and decisions may be built on our blind trust in those we follow online.

While this thinking style may help us make quick decisions with minimal effort, it can result in subpar or wrong decisions (e.g., buying things we don’t need or like). Close monitoring the information, attending to, remembering, and analyzing the details, and reminding ourselves not to rely on mental shortcuts or blind trust may help us combat the heuristic mode.

Notably, the relation between influencers and their followers is more complex in the real world of social media than what we try to simulate in the laboratory. Other characteristics of influencers, such as familiarity, emotional bond, and authenticity, together with features of social media platforms, such as real-time interaction and personalized algorithms, may play an important role in how people engage with and remember the content created or shared by influencers. These factors should be examined in future research.