Seeing Double. The effects of YouTubers and TikTokers transferring sponsored content across social media platforms

Over the years, traditional marketing strategies have become less effective, giving rise to newer and more effective marketing strategies, including influencer marketing. Letting an external party – influencers – communicate a brand’s marketing messages for them has proven to have positive effects on consumer responses such as brand attitude and purchase intention. Many influencers start out on one social media platform – their platform of origin – only to extend their social presence to other platforms as well in order to stay relevant to their (potential) audience. This can lead to content transference, meaning that influencers can post their original content from their platform of origin on their other platforms as well. The aim of this study is to examine whether this content transference from the platform of origin, being either TikTok or YouTube, to Instagram will lead to changes in consumer responses. The specific consumer responses that are studied are content liking, brand attitude, and purchase intention as they have been proven to be the most interesting and important in the field of influencer marketing. Based on previous research, predictions were made on the effects of this content transference, which were translated into seven hypotheses. In order to examine the effects of content transference on these consumer responses, an experiment was conducted. A total of 200 valid responses were collected, having a perfect distribution of respondents among the five conditions. In the four experimental conditions, respondents were shown certain stimulus material with conditions 1 and 2 being shown either sponsored content on or transferred from YouTube, and conditions 3 and 4 being shown either sponsored content on or transferred from TikTok. In the control condition, no sponsored content was shown to the respondents. Overall, no significant differences were found in all three consumer responses across the conditions, meaning that YouTubers, as well as TikTokers, are successful when it comes to transferring their sponsored content to another platform like Instagram. However, it was also found that all experimental conditions showed a decrease in brand attitude and purchase intention in comparison to the control condition. This is in contrast with previous studies in the field of influencer marketing which found that this marketing strategy will have positive effects on these consumer responses. Due to the findings being either the opposite of what was anticipated or not significant, limitations for this study were found with the relatively small sample size of the experiment being the main determinant. Based on these limitations combined with this study’s strengths, recommendations for future research were developed.