Non-Commercial Cross-Cultural Social Media Influencers: Telling China’s Story – A Case Study of a Chinese Influencer in Persian Culture

This study used the perspective of social media communication strategies to explore the non-commercial social media influencers in the context of crosscultural communication.Social media influencers, having enormous followers and high marketing potential, have been the subject of studies in recent years.Given that the literature in this field only concentrated on commercial social media influencers, this study took a different approach to explore the noncommercial cross-cultural social media influencers' roles beyond their native cultures.Employing the quantitative content analysis method, this study examined the @anahitachin Facebook page run by a Chinese journalist and social media influencer in Persian culture.Running a series of multiple regression analyses (MRA), this research found that personalized communication and cultural dialogue strategies positively influence public engagement in the context of non-commercial social media influencers on social media.However, information provision strategies did not influence public engagement in this study, and the effect of interactive communication was also limited.Besides, the findings of this research show that the content type and media type on Facebook are predictors of public engagement.Religious content, altruistic messages, and the Chinese language are the types of content that were positively associated with Parmizad, Q. H. (2024).