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Social Media Influencers (SMIs) are micro-celebrities with large followings on social media platforms who engage consumers and hold the potential to promote customer-brand relationships across different product categories. SMIs have an existing relationship of trust with consumers, and consumers seek out the content created by SMIs for valuable information and advice. This study explores the process of brand engagement between consumers and brands in the digital content marketing environment, specifically examining the research question: Do SMIs act as a route to brand engagement for their followers? The context for this study is the beauty community on YouTube; over 60,000 user comments were analyzed through automated text analysis. This study is among the first to provide empirical evidence that SMIs do act as a route to brand engagement through the three dimensions of cognitive processing, affection and activation.

BackgroundOne of the most common uses of the Internet is to search for health-related information. Although scientific evidence pertaining to cognitive health promotion has expanded rapidly in recent years, it is unclear how much of this information has been made available to Internet users. Thus, the purpose of our study was to assess the reliability and quality of information about cognitive health promotion encountered by typical Internet users.MethodsTo generate a list of relevant search terms employed by Internet users, we entered seed search terms in Google Trends and recorded any terms consistently used in the prior 2 years. To further approximate the behaviour of typical Internet users, we entered each term in Google and sampled the first two relevant results. This search, completed in October 2014, resulted in a sample of 86 webpages, 48 of which had content related to cognitive health promotion. An interdisciplinary team rated the information reliability and quality of these webpages using a standardized measure.ResultsWe found that information reliability and quality were moderate, on average. Just one retrieved page mentioned best practice, national recommendations, or consensus guidelines by name. Commercial content (i.e., product promotion, advertising content, or non-commercial) was associated with differences in reliability and quality, with product promoter webpages having the lowest mean reliability and quality ratings.ConclusionsAs efforts to communicate the association between lifestyle and cognitive health continue to expand, we offer these results as a baseline assessment of the reliability and quality of cognitive health promotion on the Internet.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12877-017-0515-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Social media influencers are becoming an increasingly popular strategic communication tactic used across industry verticals, including entertainment, fashion, and beauty, to engage directly with consumers. Pharmaceutical companies have also recently entered the social media marketing arena and—within the bounds of governmental regulations—have found ways to build relationships directly with patients using covert persuasion tactics like partnering with social media influencers. Due to consumers’ negative perceptions of pharmaceutical companies, it makes sense that new marketing tactics are being used to establish and improve relationships with consumers. Previous research well documents the ethical dilemmas of direct-to-consumer advertising, and there is recent burgeoning literature on online covert marketing tactics. The academic and medical literature, however, is behind in regard to social media influencers used in health and medicine. This paper highlights and defines terms used in industry practice, and also calls for more investigation and sets forward a research agenda. As consumers spend more time online and patients continue to consult social media for health information, it is important that this new marketing trend does not go unnoticed.