Celebrity Endorsement in Social Media

Celebrity Endorsement in Social Media

1. Introduction and Background

Social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, account for a significant share of all social media users. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have billions of registered users. In these social media, there is the existence of celebrities who have a huge following (McCracken, 1989). These celebrities include singers, movie stars, sports stars, and writers. Every comment and tweet by the celebrities might be reposted and retweeted respectively by many fans despite the fact they contribute limited content. It is undeniable that they have a huge influence on any topic. Thus, the majority of them are opinion leaders and impact the buying decisions of consumers.

Involvement of a celebrity in an advert improves the probability of the consumer buying the product (McCormick, 2016). Celebrities have a high persuasive ability, particularly to their followers. This illuminates why small and established brands allocate significant amounts of money to sign up celebrities to endorse the products to their followers. Celebrities provide an effective manner to advertise a product owing to their massive following (Djafarova & Rushworth, 2017). The increase in celebrity endorsements is attributed to the fierce competition in numerous industries through an approach to take advantage of the fame, the high number of followers of celebrities, and their persuasive power derived from their public allure (Wang et al., 2017). The research examines the perception of celebrity endorsement in social media from the consumer’s perspective.

There is literature on celebrity endorsement with established firms though little exists on local celebrity endorsements in the United Kingdom. There is a significant gap in knowledge regarding consumer perception of celebrity endorsement in social media. There is a scarcity of literature on the studies that focus on celebrity endorsement in social media and consumer perception.

Since brands have to shift with the technological world, the celebrity endorsements that brands have enforced in the previous decades, their advantages and disadvantages, and their impact of them on consumer purchasing decisions require to be understood in order for improvements to be made and the demographics that have been left behind can get the support they require promptly (Knoll & Matthes, 2017).