Are Online Influencers Trustworthy? The Virtual Audience’s Response to Online Influencers’ Endorsement in China

Although “go-social” becomes an important part of the public’s daily life in China, the online users suffer from information overload increasingly when they get exposed to online contents shared through various social media channels today. To compete on digital audience’s attention and increase communication effectiveness, online influencers are commonly employed by communication practitioners. However, questions like how powerful online influencers are and to what extent digital audience could be motivated by online influencers cannot be answered appropriately. Hence, 2x2 online experiment was used in this pilot study to identify how the use of online influencer endorsement with different social powers affected virtual audience’s response and their decision-making.

Totally, 4 experimental stimuli were designed, namely celebrity endorsement with explicit persuasive intention, celebrity endorsement with implicit persuasive intention, industry experts’ endorsement with explicit persuasive intention, and industry experts’ endorsement with implicit persuasive intention.

The experimental stimuli were developed on the Sina Weibo’s mobile version as Sina Weibo, the alternative of Twitter, has been widely used in China. It was reported to have 361 million active users each month as of June 2017 and 92% of penetration rate was contributed by mobile devices. As to the experimental scenario, target was put on public affair (protecting the natural environment). The latest online campaign in China titled “Protecting Endangered Chinese Pangolin”, which was organized by non-profit organization- The Nature Conservancy, was chosen before the experiment was conducted in late October, 2017. The Nature Conservancy (TNC) was one of the leading conservation organizations around the world. The two manipulated online influencers were Jack Ma and Jackie Chan. Both of them have similar fan base on Weibo, the first one with 22.54 million fans and the second one with 29.74 million fans. Besides, Jack Ma was the Lead Founder of TNC while Jackie Chan was the campaign ambassador. Although the campaign theme and online influencers were selected from the real life, the experiment messages were crafted and manipulated by the author in this pilot study.

Totally, 86 participants were voluntarily recruited from China, 36 males and 50 females. Among them, 64 participants claimed that they were using Weibo when the online experiment was conducted. 21 out of 64 participants pointed out that they used Weibo every day. Besides, 17 participants were Weibo heavy users. Among them, 10 participants consumed Weibo contents once per half day while the remaining 7 participants read Weibo posts once per hour. This pilot study, conducted in late October and November 2017, indicated that the use of online influencers with referent power and expert power could positively predict virtual audience’s perception toward the promotional message. However, if online campaign would like to call for action and influence audience’s behavior, the use of online influencers with expert power could be more effective than that with referent power. Moreover, both perceived expert power and referent power could win the trust from virtual audience effectively, but the computational trust could not moderate audience’s perception toward the promotional message and not even predict audience’s behavior.