A cross-cultural critical review of social media user engagement and influencer marketing in Western and Chinese literature

Abstract

The prominent rise of social media platforms and its important role in modern marketing has seen the emergence of influencer marketing, revolutionising traditional offline-oriented marketing knowledge as the generation of content from influencers and stimulation of social media user/ follower engagement are found to drastically influence the purchasing decision of online/ social media users. This study performs a critical literature review in a cross-cultural analysis on Chinese and Western literature conducted towards influencer marketing and social media user/ follower engagement. A preliminary literature review is firstly conducted to identify major research themes amongst empirical studies conducted in the field of influencer marketing, emphasising on the relationship between influencer marketing the social media follower engagement. The findings of the preliminary literature review were incorporated into the design of a two dimension thematic content-criterion method for the critical literature review, identifying the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western literature under 1) the levels of relationship between different types of influencer-type relationships and subsequent social media follower engagement, 2) the level of impacts caused from the context, content and creation of influencer generated content and its influence on the perception of followers.