A Conceptual Framework for Consumer Engagement in Social Media Influencer Posts

Introduction

The emergence of social media has transformed how people and businesses communicate and has significantly influenced individuals' daily conversations. Social media platforms have been initially designed to serve the purpose of informal communication between individuals. The definition of social media has confirmed this statement by Russo et al. (2008) as which “facilitates online communication, networking, and/or collaboration”. However, it has been found that the definition of social media has been modified over the years, which has been reflected in the research by Howard and Parks (2012) has incorporated the content and industry context and defined it in such a way that “social media consist of three parts (a) the information infrastructure and tools used to produce and distribute content; (b) the content that takes the digital form of personal messages, news, ideas, and cultural products; and (c) the people, organisations, and industries that produce and consume digital content”.

Hence, this created a huge opportunity for the business to reach more audiences, and it has seen a huge inflow of companies into these media to perform their business activities, including promotion and sales. Therefore, it is evident that social media's primary purpose has been altered and diversified, focusing on assisting companies in cost-effectively promoting their brand (Ashley & Tuten, 2015a). Fundamentally, integrating these platforms as part of their marketing strategies aims to engage consumers with the brand (Ashley & Tuten, 2015a).

Several ethical issues have evolved because of the growth in the adoption of social media as a means of communication by businesses. These issues are addressed by policymakers and questioned the ethical aspect of several business activities conducted through these channels. Recently, issues with advertising formats such as native advertisements have emerged. Because of consumer negligence to advertisements, companies have been struggling to grab consumers' attention towards advertisements. It has been revealed that consumers are blocking ads or opting for the premium version of ad-free content to access other content without delay (Schomer, 2021). As a result, businesses are in a position to frame tactics to solve this issue by experimenting with different advertising formats, such as native advertising practices. This type of advertising presents content by blending the sponsored content with non-sponsored content(Wojdynski & Golan, 2016). These types of advertising formats are ubiquitous, whilst identifying advertisements in these formats is very challenging for consumers. (Federal Trade Commission, 2015) clearly, companies have a paid collaboration with any entities and have engaged in any promotional activities through which entities have to disclose their paid partnership to consumers.

Native advertisements have existed in different forms, and evidence has been revealed that influencer marketing has included this category (Evans et al., 2017).In this regard, it is found that social media influencers have been involved in promotional events on behalf of monetary or non-monetary compensation. In this case, the (Advertising Standard Council of India, 2022) has raised the issue based on the complaints received from consumers regarding the difficulty among Indian consumers to recognise the advertising influencer post. Therefore, this study has been built under the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) and has extended this theory to support other vital theories to fill the gaps in existing literature and raise concerns. Certainly, PKM is the most appropriate theory for discovering consumers' ad recognition in influencers' posts. Previous studies have mainly addressed the relationship between disclosure types, disclosure timing, disclosure language and online behavioural intention, purchase intention, brand attitude, video attitude, influencer attitude, intention to spread e-wom, and brand recall (Boerman, 2019; Evans et al., 2017; Reijmersdal et al.,2020; Weismueller et al.,2020). The researcher pointed out that consumer engagement in the context of sponsorship disclosure remains an area that has been underexplored in existing literature(Pradhan et al., 2023).