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The purpose of this study is to address the surging reliance on influencer marketing in evolving business models, focusing on a novel approach – the influencer e-commerce storefront. This study investigates various influencer advertising disclosures, social media activities and their impact on consumer engagement and sales within the influencer e-commerce storefront.

Secondary data was collected on 734 influencers from an e-commerce website based on “influencer” storefronts, and the influencer’s social media activity and content were collected from Instagram. Two-stage seemingly unrelated regression model was used to examine the research model.

Influencer social media use, encompassing daily posts, story posts and average comments, positively influences consumer engagement and sales on influencer e-commerce storefronts. Notably, the study reveals that different advertising disclosure languages yield varying effects. Unclear disclosures (e.g. branded Highlights) positively impact engagement and sales, while obvious disclosures (e.g. “Sponsored Ad”) negatively affect both.

The study contributes to Persuasion Knowledge Theory, examining influencer e-commerce storefronts and revealing the persuasive impact of undisclosed language in advertising. This study innovatively explores the effects of obvious and undisclosed sponsorship on coping mechanisms, offering insights into consumer reactions. The recommended use of undisclosed language suggests that ambiguity can enhance ad persuasion, guiding practitioners in crafting more effective messages. Moreover, the study extends co-creation theory and service-dominant logic by underscoring the significance of influencers’ social media engagement in co-creating value for consumers. Influencers’ active engagement on social media fosters co-creation, strengthening connections and boosting consumer loyalty.

This research examines how universities enhance the virality of their social media messages among students. Specifically, we explore whether and how positive affective content in universities’ social media posts can influence sharing behavior. We also investigate the mediating roles of perceived effort and positive emotional reaction, as well as the moderating effect of visual content (i.e. photos).

Drawing upon the emotions as social information model, we conducted (1) an online experiment (N = 222) and (2) text analysis of 1,269,798 Twitter posts extracted from the accounts of 94 UK universities over 11 years (2010–2020) to test our hypotheses.

The findings show that social media posts containing positive affective content encourage sharing behavior and the relationship is mediated by both perceived effort and positive emotional reaction. An additional finding suggests that the use of visual content (photos) strengthens the relationship between positive affective content and sharing behaviors through an interaction effect.

This study contributes to the scant research focusing on positive affective content in the higher education context. The findings shed light on how universities could create social media communications that engage current and prospective students.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how users on social media view brands with a heritage. Consumers commonly post opinions and accounts of their experiences with brands on social media. Such consumer-generated content may or may not overlap with content desired by brand managers. Drawing from “The medium is the message” paradigm, this study text-mines user narratives on Twitter1 to shed light on the role of social media in shaping public images of brands with heritage through the lens of the stereotype content model.

The study uses a data set of almost 80,000 unique tweets on 12 brands across six categories, compares brands high versus low in heritage and combines dictionary-based content analysis with sentiment analysis.

The results indicate that both user-generated content and sentiment are significantly more positive for brands low rather than high in heritage. Regarding warmth, consumers use significantly more positive words on sociability and fewer negative words on morality for brands low rather than high in heritage. Regarding competence, tweets include more positive words on assertiveness and ability for low-heritage brands. Finally, overall sentiment is more positive for brands low rather than high in heritage.

Important from co-creation and integrated marketing communication perspectives, the findings provide brand managers with actionable insights on how to more effectively use social media.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to examine user-generated content in a brand heritage context. It demonstrates that heritage brands, with their longevity and strong links to the past, need to be aware of how contemporary social media can detract from their image.

This study aims to investigate how the gratifications obtained through brand-related social media content affect brand intimacy and thereby influence customer extra-role behavior.

Using the uses and gratification theory, this study proposes information, entertainment and remuneration content that motivates customers to develop brand intimacy and thereby perform customer extra-role behavior. The study also tests the moderated moderation effect of self-congruence and customer experience using 704 observations from South India in the food industry context.

The study’s results reveal the influence of entertainment and remuneration content on brand intimacy, which further influences customer extra-role behavior (civic virtue, cocreation, sportsmanship and helping behaviors). The study confirms a moderated moderation effect in the relationship between brand intimacy and civic virtue and brand intimacy and sportsmanship behaviors.

The study suggests that brands may include entertainment and remuneration elements in their social media content to build intimate customer relationships, further influencing customers’ extra-role behaviors. Besides, brands should focus on customers’ self-concepts and experiences to encourage them to act voluntarily.

This study makes a unique contribution by investigating the influence of brand-related social media content on customer extra-role behavior through brand intimacy. It uses self-congruence and customer experience to test their moderated moderation effect in the relationship between brand intimacy and customer extra-role behavior.

The cruise industry has used technology to attract more millennials than ever before. The progression of social media has transformed the way young individuals gather information for their travel decision-making. Hence, this study aims to investigate the effects of the characteristics of social media – Instagram – on millennials’ trust in and attitudes toward social media content and their behavioral intentions.

A self-administered survey was designed to test the study model, and 323 responses collected were deemed valid for main data analysis.

The results revealed that perceived enjoyment of content is a powerful antecedent of trust, attitudes and behavioral intentions. Content quality is a strong predictor of trust but has no meaningful effect on attitudes and behavioral intentions.

Theoretically, this study contributes to the research in the tourism literature on social media and cruise marketing based on integrating into the technology acceptance model, the characteristics of social media content and trust based on commitment-trust theory. This study can help cruise operators use Instagram to influence millennials and suggests significant implications based on social media interactions with millennials.

Social media marketers are keen to understand how viewers perceive their brands on a platform and how the learning experiences from content can impact their attitudes toward a brand. This study aims to focus on examining the effect of firm-generated content (FGC) on X (formerly known as Twitter), using Kolb’s experiential learning theory to analyze the viewers’ learning process. In addition, the study investigates how the length of time a viewer follows a brand and the type of brand can influence their attitudes toward it.

This study involved three qualitative studies on X to investigate how content learning affects consumer attitudes toward two brands, namely, Nike and Subway. The study also examined the impact of the duration of following the brands, with participants following the brands for 4, 8 and 12 weeks, respectively, to assess changes in their attitudes.

The results demonstrate that content learning significantly impacts consumer attitudes. By following brands and engaging with their FGC over time, viewers can transition from being occasional or intermittent followers to becoming devoted brand enthusiasts. Through the four-stage experiential learning process, followers undergo cognitive, emotional and behavioral transformations that collectively shape their brand attitudes. The impact of content learning varies according to the brand type, and the duration of following has a positive effect on brand attitudes.

The study’s findings have significant marketing implications for social media marketers, suggesting that they should restructure their social media platforms as learning platforms to effectively engage followers. Companies should adjust their content marketing strategies from a learner’s perspective, providing followers with content that resonates with them, enhances their learning outcomes and helps shift their beliefs and brand attitudes, ultimately converting them into loyal consumers.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this qualitative research is the first of its kind to apply experiential learning theories to investigate how users learn from FGC by following brands on social media and how this learning ultimately changes their brand attitude. The study provides a unique perspective on social media marketing, enriching the understanding of content marketing and consumer experiences on social media platforms.

Social media enables sport organizations to connect with customers in a dynamic, ubiquitous, and timely manner. Although these organizations routinely use social media, the best practices to improve customer engagement remain elusive. This paper aims to examine National Football League (NFL) teams’ Instagram posts to understand how sport teams can utilize social media to drive customer engagement.

Guided by uses and gratification theory, the author employs a machine learning algorithm to assess the content of NFL teams’ posts from the 2013–2014 season to the 2017–2018 season. The author performs regression analyses to investigate how post topic, together with confounding factors, boost customer engagement.

Results highlight the importance of informational content in eliciting engagement and reveal distinctions in topics deemed “social content” in the literature. The author further identifies variations in how post topics engage sport fans and general customers.

Results provide implications for sport organizations to craft social media content for customer engagement.

This study aims to analyse the nature and forms of digital content that may influence e-participation for persons with disabilities (PWDs) during a flood disaster.

This paper undertakes a case study of the 2019 and 2020’s flood in Kerala, India. In-depth interviews with rehab workers during the flood are used in the study. Topic modelling and sentiment analysis are carried out using Twitter data. The native language responses from Facebook forums related to PWDs are analysed manually to construct taxonomy of problematic content

The results show that problematic content toward PWDs in the social media occurs during a flood. The extreme and exploitative content results in disability exclusion. Thus, e-participants fail to address the actual disability-specific requirements through social media during a disaster.

The paper explores social media content toward PWDs. Implications of findings on citizens’ e-participation competency are delineated. Existing e-participation literature reports a low degree of disability e-participation in social media. Exploring disability e-participation helps to design more inclusive participation platforms. Further studies can explore the disability consciousness among e-participants for a more inclusive space.

The development of problematic content in the social media environment is alarming. Regulatory frameworks are also less adequate. Hence, policies for enabling inclusive participation that is not limited to the information technology infrastructure is needed.

First, the citizens will get more insights for meaningful disability e-participation. Second, inclusive e-participation platform designs will help to reduce problematic content generation.

Disability e-participation requires regional studies. But there are fewer studies on disability e-participation from developing nations. The current study considered the regional context and complexities of disability e-participation. This paper gives policy recommendations for an inclusive e-participation.

An increasing number of brands are using algorithms to embed brand-related content to targeted consumers’ social media pages. This paper aims to analyze how do consumers’ motives of using social media in general influence their potential brand–consumer interactions and the following branding outcomes. To examine this, this study selected Facebook as the social media platform and Nike as the brand to conduct an online survey experiment to examine the effects of social media usage motives on consumers’ interactions with the brand in social media.

An online survey experiment using Nike’s Facebook page as the stimuli was conducted to analyze the interactions between consumers and a specific brand’s social media page in a natural setting. Data were collected in the USA via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk).

This study demonstrated that brand–consumer interactions, both content-consumption and content-contribution intentions, can be fostered by certain motives of using social media: information-seeking and self-identity. This study also suggested that content-consumption behavior has significant associations with consumers’ positive attitudes toward the brand’s social media pages, while content-contribution behavior does not show significant effects.

This study provides new insights about how consumers’ general motives of social media usage influence their intentions to interact with the brand in social media from two levels (i.e. content-consumption and content-contribution).