Abstract

Consumers use social media to create content, generate online word-of-mouth, and communicate with brands and other consumers. Consumers engage with influencers who deliver content that is timely, entertaining, and interesting to them. Many influencers have a truly global following across the world. However, there is little research on international aspects of social media influencers. Our paper leverages Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to study consumer engagement using a novel dataset of global sustainability influencers. Our results indicate that the cultural distance between the influencer and the followers is an important driver of engagement in a nuanced way. While the level of superficial, light engagement is not affected by the cultural distance between an influencer and her followers, the level of deep engagement increases when an influencer and her followers are culturally close. The effect is more pronounced for followers in countries where environmental concerns are considered more important.

摘要

消费者使用社交媒体来创建内容、产生在线口碑以及与品牌和其他消费者进行交流。消费者与有影响力的人互动，他们提供及时、有趣和有趣的内容。许多有影响力的人在世界各地拥有真正的全球追随者。然而，关于社交媒体影响者的国际方面的研究很少。我们的论文利用 Hofstede 的文化维度，使用全球可持续发展影响者的新数据集来研究消费者参与度。我们的结果表明，影响者和追随者之间的文化距离是以细微差别的方式参与的重要驱动因素。虽然肤浅的、轻微的参与程度不受网红与其追随者之间文化距离的影响，当影响者和她的追随者在文化上接近时，深度参与的程度就会增加。对于环境问题被认为更重要的国家的追随者来说，这种影响更为明显。