Do people really dislike it when the influencers they follow on social media post sponsored content? The straight answer is yes! However, it is not an easy answer because there are certain people who do not mind the influencers posts sponsored content as long as it is what they are truly interested in. Although, brands devote increasing share of their marketing expense to sponsoring content on social media platforms, not enough has been done to measure the effectiveness of this marketing strategy.
This is where a professor and a doctoral student at Harvard Business School comes into play. Professor Shunyuan Zhang and student Magie Cheng did a study on the effectiveness of the marketing tactics or its overall impact on influencers, followers, platforms and brands.
Methodology
The researchers focused on the interaction between influencers and their followers by surveying 861 English-speaking YouTube influencers in the beauty and lifestyle category. They analysed over 85,000 videos that were posted by these influencers between August 2019 and August 2020. The data that were analysed are: how many people viewed or liked each video, which of the videos were sponsored (Federal Communications Commission regulation requires influencers to disclose which content was sponsored), influencers voice, emotion, and appearance, videos’s visual aesthetics, influencer’s number of followers before and after each video was posted.
Analysis
The influencers were then divided into two groups – one treated and the other untreated. Treated, meaning the influencers who posted at least one sponsored content. Untreated, meaning the influencers who posted only organic, unaffiliated content. The untreated serves as the control group so as to isolate the effect of sponsored content on followers count. Then the researchers examined what happened for influencers after they posted a sponsored content on their YouTube channel.
Result
Posting a sponsored video on YouTube leads to an average of 0.17 percent decline in the number of followers over subsequent three days. This number may look insignificant, but putting it into perspective, it adds up over time. Likewise, this means that an influencer with 1 million followers who posts 100 sponsored content a year will lose 170,000 followers annually (i.e. ((0.17/100) x 1,000,000) x 100).
One of the things social media influencers care more about is their follower count. Losing this amount of followers annually can be very emotionally (and financially) painful. Emotionally because the lose could either lead to lack of motivation to post organic content or lead to a dent of their social media status. Financially because the rates influencers charge brands depends on the amount of the followers they have.
The decline in followers count could however be minimised if influencers post sponsored content that are similar or aligned with the types of unpaid videos they normally post. It may be a difficult thing to find a fit between the types of videos – paid and unpaid – but it is required of every influencers to stay true to what keeps their followers engagement on the up.
About the research
Title: Reputation Burning: Analyzing the Impact of Brand Sponsorship on Social Influencers.
Authors: Mengjie Cheng and Shunyuan Zhang
Type: A working paper
