Analysis of influencer advertising on social media posts and its influence on audience engagement

We investigated the prevalence of influencer advertising in China and how online influencers engage social media audiences. We analyzed 1,779 posts from the Sina Weibo accounts of 10 selected online influencers by combining traditional content analysis with web data crawling of audience engagements with social media posts. It was found that online influencers do not frequently share advertising messages with their audiences. Online influencers in China more frequently use photos than videos to communicate with their social media audiences. Posts with promotional incentives as well as event information are more likely to engage audiences. Posts with brand information however are less likely to engage audiences. Furthermore, text is more effective than photos/images in generating likes from social media audiences.