Mega or Micro? Influencer Selection Using Follower Elasticity
研究网红营销中粉丝数量与视频观看量之间的弹性关系，提出粉丝弹性指标（FEI），帮助企业在大小网红之间做出选择，基于TikTok数据、内容表征学习和机器学习因果推断方法。
Influencer marketing, in which companies sponsor social media personalities to promote their brands, has exploded in popularity in recent years. One common criterion for selecting an influencer partner is popularity. While some firms collaborate with “mega” influencers with millions of followers, other firms partner with “micro” influencers with only several thousand followers, but who also cost less to sponsor. To quantify this trade-off between popularity and cost, the authors develop a framework for estimating the follower elasticity of impressions (FEI), which measures a video's percentage gain in impressions (i.e., views) corresponding to a percentage increase in the number of followers of its creator. Computing FEI involves estimating the causal effect of an influencer's popularity on the view counts of their videos, which is achieved through a combination of (1) a unique data set collected from TikTok, (2) a representation learning model for quantifying video content, and (3) a machine learning–based causal inference method. The authors find that FEI is always positive, averaging .10, but often nonlinearly related to follower size. They examine the factors that predict variation in these FEI curves and show how firms can use these results to better determine influencer partnerships.