How sentiment volatility of influencer product recommendation posts affects customer engagement

Mingli Zhang, Kesheng Xie, Shensheng Cai and Yu Wang

Journal of Business Research, 2025, vol. 200, issue C

Abstract: Social media influencers’ involvement in product promotion is a popular trend. The effectiveness of their product recommendation posts largely depends on customer engagement. Influencers organize sentences of different sentiment valence in a specific sequence when offering products’ basic information, sharing usage experiences, and providing product evaluations in the product recommendation posts, resulting in dynamic changes in sentence sentiment valence, that is, sentiment volatility. Drawing on narrative transportation theory, an investigation—combining an analysis of 12,849 influencer product recommendation posts on the Xiaohongshu platform (Study 1) and a further controlled experiment (Study 2) — reveals that sentiment volatility negatively affects customer engagement and this effect is driven by narrative transportation. Additionally, Study 1 indicates that the influencer type (micro- vs. macro-influencers) and product type (search vs. experience goods) have moderating effects. Our study advances sentiment research in influencer marketing and offers practical insights into narrative sentiment strategies for influencers’ product recommendations.

Keywords: Influencer marketing; Customer engagement; Sentiment volatility; Natural language processing; Narrative transportation theory; Product recommendation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296325004205
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:200:y:2025:i:c:s0148296325004205

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2025.115597

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().