persuasion cues of women influencers on social networks to create electronic word-of-mouth advertising and purchase intentions

Abstract

The advent of social networks has brought about changes in various aspects of human life, and marketing is one of the areas that has been affected. With the emergence of influencers with the ability to influence the wide followers in social networks, brands' interest in influencer marketing is growing rapidly and today brands spend most of their advertising budgets on influencer marketing. In the present study, using the Elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (ELM) and Concepts such as Para-social interaction (PSI) and Electronic Word of mouth (EWOM), we investigated the effect of persuasion cues of women influencers on the intention to buy followers as the aim of the study. The case study of this study was beauty women influencers on Instagram. For this purpose, by identifying 4 prominent beauty influencers among Iranian users, the pages of these women influencers on Instagram were examined. The present research is applied in terms of descriptive nature and its method is survey and data collection tool is an online questionnaire. 396 questionnaires were collected by available sampling method. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS software version 3 and SmartPls software version 26. The results showed that persuasion cues related to expertise, Trustworthiness and experience with the variable mediated by source credibility and persuasion cues related to self-disclosure, social attractiveness, attitude homophily with the mediating variable of PSI have an effect on EWOM and ultimately intention to purchase followers. Contrary to the researcher's expectations, effective physical attractiveness has no effect on PSI and ultimately EWOM and intention to purchase followers.

Keywords

• persuasion
• social networks
• women influencers
• ewom
• instagram