EXPRESS: Seeding Social Affirmation: Influencer + Follower Seeding Strategies and the Diffusion of Online Word-of-Mouth

Given influencers’ greater social influence, managers are often advised to target influencers alone in social media marketing. However, the spread of word-of-mouth (WOM) may be enhanced by social affirmation (i.e., cues a message is valuable to others). The authors show that an influencer + follower seeding strategy, in which the best influencer-follower pair in a social network is chosen to tweet and retweet a message, respectively, outperforms an influencer-only strategy in spreading word-of-mouth. Lab experiments show that the likelihood that a user chooses to share or engage with a promoted tweet is higher under an influencer + follower strategy than under an influencer-only or influencer-twice strategy. Greater perceived message value to others explains these results. A field study involving promoted tweets shows that an influencer + follower strategy leads to greater event attendance than a two-influencer strategy. Simulation results show that the advantages of influencer + follower seeding strategies over influencer-only strategies are greater for social networks characterized by a stronger response to social affirmation. When social affirmation is not important to WOM diffusion, an influencer-only seeding strategy is superior. These findings contribute to research on seeding strategies and provide firms a way to improve return on investments in influencer marketing.