Abstract
Social media has the potential to be a powerful tool for influencing social norms and normative behaviour as evidenced by the trends in contexts such as health behaviours including Fitspo, paleo, veganism, CrossFit etc. In any context some individuals have greater influence on consumers than others (Soneji, et al 2015) for example, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has had a significant influence on food policy, school menus and individual food behaviour (Slocum, et al 2011). Individuals who achieve a high amount of attention on social media, with large numbers of followers are now being coined micro-celebrities, as they closely mimic mainstream celebrities on a smaller scale (Page, 2012; Thomas, 2014). As such, social marketers need to understand how consumers engage with social media and how micro celebrities influence consumers who seek to link their real or aspirational identities with those of their favourite micro celebrities or cultural movement for example, paleo. The rapid growth of social media and mobile phone ownership has made it increasingly possible for information exchanges, particularly user-generated content (Bernhardt, et al 2012) from micro-celebrities. The aim of this paper is to investigate social marketing organisations' social media performance and engagement in comparison to that of micro-celebrities.