Social media influencer marketing has grown substantially in the last decade and is a major advertising channel for many brands. Social media influencers weave sponsored posts with organic content into their feeds, which raises concerns among regulators and consumer advocates that users may not be able to clearly distinguish between sponsored and organic influencer content. Thus, regulators often mandate the explicit disclosure of sponsored content. However, there is little empirical evidence based on field data about the effects of explicit sponsorship disclosure. Therefore, we empirically investigate the effects of explicitly disclosing sponsorship in influencers’ content on users’ engagement using a large-scale field dataset collected from Facebook and Instagram. Our empirical results suggest that explicit sponsorship disclosure increases user awareness of the advertising nature and earns users’ favorability by enhancing transparency about the sponsored content. We further designed two online experiments to corroborate our empirical results and directly test the underlying mechanisms. Our findings have novel and important implications for marketers, influencers, social media platforms, and regulators in the influencer marketing industry.

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明确的赞助披露对社交媒体影响者营销中用户参与度的影响

社交媒体影响者营销在过去十年中大幅增长，是许多品牌的主要广告渠道。社交媒体影响者将带有自然内容的赞助帖子编织到他们的提要中，这引起了监管机构和消费者权益倡导者的担忧，即用户可能无法清楚地区分赞助内容和自然影响者内容。因此，监管机构经常要求明确披露赞助内容。然而，关于明确赞助披露的影响，几乎没有基于现场数据的经验证据。因此，我们使用从 Facebook 和 Instagram 收集的大规模现场数据集，实证研究了在影响者内容中明确披露赞助对用户参与度的影响。我们的实证结果表明，明确的赞助信息披露可以提高用户对广告性质的认识，并通过提高赞助内容的透明度来赢得用户的好感度。我们进一步设计了两个在线实验来证实我们的实证结果并直接测试潜在的机制。我们的研究结果对影响者营销行业的营销人员、影响者、社交媒体平台和监管机构具有新颖而重要的影响。