A guide to social influence marketing in online environments

Dr Rodrigo Perez-Vega (@rpvega) is a Lecturer in Digital Marketing at Henley Business School. His research focuses on how to make branded social media presence more engaging for customers. He has consulted companies on digital marketing and social media strategy in the UK, France, Spain and the Middle East.

Social influence marketing employs social psychology principles to achieve marketing and business goals. It draws on the fact that as potential customers make a purchasing decision, they are being influenced by various forces. Within the field of social psychology, the concept of ‘social influence’ and its effect on individual behaviour, attitudes and beliefs is widely studied. Social influence has also of interest to marketers as consumer-to-consumer interactions are believed to affect consumer behaviour, attitudes, and feelings towards a product or brand. Trends towards brands being present in online environments, plus the innate human need to anthropomorphise objects to facilitate interactions with non-material objects make brand-consumer interactions within social media subject to similar effects.

Adapted from: Perez-Vega, R., Waite, K., & O’Gorman, K. (2016). Social impact theory: An examination of how immediacy operates as an influence upon social media interaction in Facebook fan pages. The Marketing Review, 16(3), 299-321.

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