Abstract
Previous research on social media marketing assumes that the more followers or “likes” an individual or company has on social media, the better. The current research is the first that challenges this assumption by showing that people make inferences about the credibility of social media accounts based on the number of likes a post receives relative to the size of its likely audience. The findings indicate that high as well as low likes-to-followers ratios negatively influence the perceived credibility of the account and, as such, dampen social media marketing effectiveness. The addition of hashtags is identified as a way to guard against the negative impact of high likes-to-followers ratios. Managers, (aspiring) influencers, and people in general involved in (personal) branding on social media can use the present findings to maximize the effectiveness of their social media marketing strategy.
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Notes
A pretest (N = 28, 57.1% male; mean age 20.6, SD = 0.84) confirmed that users pay attention to the likes-to-followers ratio and number of hashtags. After showing participants a fictitious Instagram account of Peter with 228 followers, 1191 likes on a post, and three hashtags, they were asked how they would describe “Peter”. Example responses were (italics added for emphasis): “As he has excessive likes compared to the followers he has, thinking about Peter I see an insecure person.” And “Peter is an account with approximately the same number of followers and followed. However, it is shocking that his picture has around 1000 likes. This suggests he paid or downloaded an app to get more likes, which makes him a little bit of a “loser”... Also, he only has three hashtags, so it will be nearly impossible to get all the likes for a normal/traditional picture of clouds and only three hashtags.”
Possible structural relationships that are not central to, and hence not tested in, the current research are depicted with light gray dashed lines.
Controlling for social media expertise by including it as a covariate rendered the same results (moderateI vs. low [.10, .66], moderateII vs. low [.05, .56]).
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This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economics (grant number ECO2017-87369-P).
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Appendix
Appendix
Likes-to-followers ratio manipulation experiment 1. Low/moderate/high likes-to-followers ratio condition
Likes-to-followers ratio manipulation experiment 2. ModerateI/moderateII/low likes-to-followers ratio condition
Hashtag manipulation experiment 3. Few/many hashtags condition
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De Vries, E.L.E. When more likes is not better: the consequences of high and low likes-to-followers ratios for perceived account credibility and social media marketing effectiveness. Mark Lett 30, 275–291 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-019-09496-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-019-09496-6