Choosing the Best Social Media Influencer: The role of gender, age, and product type in influencer marketing.

Abstract

Introduction: Social media has created a new type of celebrity form (influencers), which is defined as people who are famous on social media and have many followers. Companies currently depend on influencers to send their marketing messages to the audience, and to increase the marketing ROI, it is important to target the right influencers. Purpose: This research focused on social media influencers’ impact on consumer purchase intent and showed whether gender difference of consumers or influencers had any effect on those decisions. The research also included the age of consumers and the product type to know if they had any effect. Methodology: Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to obtain the required information; two focus groups were conducted to get the names of 80 influencers, and an online questionnaire was used to collect the data, formula of the sample size by Krejcie and Morgan (1970 as cited by Kasomo, 2001) was used to determine study sample of 387 respondents. Results: The results indicated that male influencers impact male consumers more than female consumers, while female influencers impact female consumers more than male consumers. Age of consumer does not affect the gender-based impact results. In addition, the results indicate that only few influencers have more impact on specific product type, thus, influencer’s impact based on product type is not so common. Recommendations: It is recommended for the companies to find influencers who are having a lot of impact on a specific product type that matches the product they want to promote, and to select the influencer based on the customers they are targeting, if companies are targeting female customers, they should look for popular female influencer, and if they are targeting male customers, they should look for popular male influencer.