THE ROLE OF CONSUMER INVOLVEMENT IN INFLUENCER FOLLOWING ON INFLUENCERS’ CREDIBILITY PERCEPTIONS

Abstract

Social media is an important tool for companies to build and maintain relationships with consumers globally. In that direction, influencer marketing is becoming an important part of companies’ strategies due to increasing popularity of social media influencers. Influencers affect attitudes and behavior of consumers, by creating and promoting branded content for their “followers” and for companies’ target consumers present on social media where influencers share their content. The purpose of this paper is to examine Instagram influencers’ credibility with the main goal to determine the role of different level of followers’ involvement in influencer following on followers’ perceptions about influencers’ credibility, based on the assumption that the level of involvement influences consumers’ perceptions of influencers’ credibility. To collect primary data, an online survey was conducted on a purposive sample. An ANOVA test was used to analyze the answers from an effective set of 76 respondents-active Instagram users in North Macedonia. It can be concluded that social media users with different level of involvement have different perceptions of expertise, trustworthiness, and similarity as influencers’ credibility dimensions. However, perceptions of influencers’ attractiveness did not differ based on the level of involvement. Lastly, recommendations are given for future research that will provide an in-depth view at this topic.