Sagit Bar-Gill
Did you Know you are a Micro-Influencer? The Impact of Influence Awareness on Online Content Consumption
In recent years, micro-influencers have become an integral part of social media marketing strategies harnessing their local influence to drive brand outcomes. In this study, we posit that small-scale influencers’ awareness of their influencer status may be enhanced by targeted messaging, such that perceived influence affects online activity. We study the impact of perceived influence and its interaction with actual social media influence on news exploration and consumption in an online experiment setting. We find that enhancing individuals’ awareness of their social media micro-influence increases exploration intensity and content consumption. This effect is largely driven by individuals with relatively high influence levels. The results suggest that the micro-influencer status is, at least partly, subjective and manipulable, and will inform the design of digital content platforms, as well as influencer-based marketing strategies.
Sagit Bar-Gill is an assistant professor of Technology Management and Information Systems at the Coller School of Management in Tel Aviv University, and a Digital Fellow at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Her research studies the economics of online markets, and the impacts of digitization on firms and consumers, using online experiments, causal inference methods, and data science. Her work has been published in top journals, including Management Science, Management of Information Systems Quarterly, and Journal of the Association of Information Systems.
Sagit holds a PhD and MA in economics, and a BSc in mathematics from Tel Aviv University.