Social Media Influencers and Customer Engagement: Unravelling the Impact on Buying Decision

In the last few years, a new kind of marketing has emerged as an influential and powerful tool to connect with consumers called as social media marketing. Social media usage is omnipresent, and Brands to effectively retain, appeal and attract customers need to lever this channel via social media influencers (SMIs) to achieve their strategic objectives. This channel provides platform for users where they can engage in a variety of ways with influencers or fellow users, such as commenting on the posts, liking the post, writing reviews or their experience, giving opinions etc. This concept is called as customer engagement. It refers to the extent of an individual’s engagement and association with the actions and posts of an influencer. In social networking, customer engagement is typically gauged through various metrics, such as no. of comments, subscriptions, views, shares, likes and similar activities. Building upon the existing literature and studies, increased engagement on SMIs posts builds trust of the consumer impacting their buying decisions. Despite the increasing attention from marketing researchers, there remains a lack of comprehensive research studying the association between customer engagement (no. of likes and comments on social media influencer’s post) and buying decision. This study seeks to fill the above gap by empirically investigating the impact on buying decision. Our study is conducted on Gen Z, i.e., includes those individuals who are born between 1995 and 2010. They are management students of Indore City. Sample of 205 respondents who are social media users, are considered for the study. Since our sample accurately represents the specific attributes of our study i.e., age, social media usage and education level; we have selected Non-probability sampling method called as purposive sampling technique to collect the primary data. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to explore the factors of customer engagement. For the formulated hypotheses, Chi-square independence of attributes were performed and the results revealed that buying decision is dependent on no. of likes and comments on social media influencer’s posts: