Research Insight | How Do Influencers Grow their Following?
Most research focuses on how brands can use influencers rather than on how influencers build followings themselves. A Journal of Interactive Marketing study shifts this perspective by investigating the content and engagement strategies that actually help influencers grow.
Over a span of 2.5 years, researchers analyzed more than 14 million Instagram posts from over 6,000 influencers across 57 countries. Several patterns emerge: Influencers who post more frequently tend to grow faster, but returns diminish with volume alone. Growth also depends on how content is constructed. Influencers who show their faces, smile, vary their formats (e.g., combining stories and feed posts), and avoid overly repetitive content tend to grow more quickly. By contrast, heavy tagging, frequent advertising, or raciness are linked to slower growth. These results hold even after accounting for follower count and region.
Brands and managers can use these insights to identify high-potential influencers and help coach existing partners. Instead of simply encouraging influencers to post more or be more promotional, managers might recommend that they highlight their personality, diversify formats, or reduce overuse of tags and mentions.
For example, consider two travel influencers. One shares a rotating mix of scenic images, short videos, and personal captions that reveal a distinct voice. The other repeats similar ad-style posts, tagging brands in nearly every one. Even with similar engagement levels, the first is far more likely to grow and deliver stronger value over time.
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What You Need to Know
- Use follower growth as a long-term metric when evaluating influencer performance.
- Look for influencers who balance content frequency, format diversity, and emotional appeal.
- Coach influencers to avoid overusing ads or mentions, which may slow audience growth.
Abstract
Most research on influencers takes the perspective of marketers, examining how influencers can be leveraged to build brands. However, as influencers grow in popularity, they are becoming a marketing force in their own right, warranting deeper exploration from their perspective. This article shifts the focus to influencers as active marketers, using a multilevel mixed-effects growth model to identify factors associated with follower growth. Analyzing a dataset of 14,311,145 pieces of Instagram content posted over more than two years from 6,079 influencers across 57 countries, the authors examine how attention labor (content strategy and persona appeal) and relationship labor (captioning strategy and ecosystem connectivity) relate to follower growth. Whereas existing research primarily focuses on engagement with specific pieces of content, this study takes a broader approach, investigating how influencers’ content and engagement strategies are associated with differences in follower growth over time. By reframing influencers as marketers rather than media vehicles, this study contributes to marketing theory and provides insights for influencers, influencer agencies, and marketers who seek to better understand influencer growth.
Colin Campbell, Jeffrey M. Girard, Daniel McDuff, and Sara Rosengren, “How Influencers Grow: An Empirical Study and Future Research Agenda,” Journal of Interactive Marketing, 61 (2), 117–36.