Purpose
This study aims to examine if the participation of live-stream influencers (LSIs) affects tipping frequency on live streaming platforms, and further investigate the mediating and moderating mechanisms.
Design/methodology/approach
Quasi-experiment and difference-in-differences models are used for data analysis. Propensity score matching is used to address potential unobservable endogeneity.
Findings
Real-time live streaming data reveal that LSIs’ participation significantly improves tipping frequency in live streaming rooms. Also, more users are attracted to the live streaming rooms and more users become active in participation. Additionally, the positive impact of LSIs’ participation is enhanced in the live streaming rooms with a greater number of relationship links between users.
Research limitations/implications
The findings clarify the new role of influencers and reveal the mechanisms on how LSIs benefit the platforms.
Practical implications
The findings offer novel insights into implementing influencer marketing to interactive social media platforms, by encouraging influencer participation, user relationship building and influencer network growth.
Originality/value
This study highlights the value of LSIs for interactive social media platforms in terms of organic growth, revenue generation and cost reduction.
Online health communities (OHCs) have enjoyed increasing popularity in recent years, especially in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, several concerns have been raised regarding the privacy of users’ personal information in OHCs. Considering that OHCs are a type of data-sharing or data-driven platform, it is crucial to determine whether users’ health information privacy concerns influence their behaviors in OHCs. Thus, by conducting a survey, this study explores the impact of users’ health information privacy concerns on their engagement and payment behavior (Paid) in OHCs. The empirical results show that users’ concerns about health information privacy reduce their Paid in OHCs by negatively influencing their OHC engagement. Further analysis reveals that if users have higher benefit appraisals (i.e., perceived informational and emotional support from OHCs) and lower threat appraisals (i.e., perceived severity and vulnerability of information disclosure from OHCs), the negative effect of health information privacy concerns on users’ OHC engagement will decrease.
PurposeFacilitated by image retouch tools, social media influencers can digitally enhance their self-image in product recommendation posts. This paper proposes that image enhancement may serve as a cue for the audience to assess the authenticity of the influencer (“true to oneself”), which further affects the influencer's product recommendation effectiveness (i.e. attitudes toward the post and recommended product).Design/methodology/approachExperiment 1 examines the effect of image enhancement on consumers' perceived influencer authenticity and product recommendation effectiveness. Experiment 2 considers the moderating role of post type, examining the effects in informational versus storytelling posts.FindingsConsumers perceived an influencer to be more authentic when the image is not enhanced; in turn, consumers reported more favorable attitudes toward the post and the recommended product upon reading the post. The effects are moderated by post type: the effect of image enhancement (through perceived influencer authenticity) exists in posts using an informational message format but is attenuated for those using a storytelling message format.Originality/valueThis research enriches the literature on authenticity cues by documenting a novel visual cue and contributes to influencer marketing by identifying a nuanced interactive effect between image enhancement and post type on recommendation effectiveness.
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