The Authenticity of Fashion Social Media Influencers: The Follower Perspective

Social media influencers (SMIs) are a key communication tool for businesses because they cultivate highly engaged audiences. Over $25 billion AUD in advertising is spent on them globally each year (Tlozek, 2023). Micro SMIs, those who have 10,000 to 100,000 followers, have close and intimate relationships with their audiences and followers, are seen as sincere, authentic and are thus favoured by businesses for sponsored partnerships (Campbell & Farrell, 2020; Park et al., 2021; Gomez, 2019). However, prior research into SMI authenticity has taken the perspective of the brand using the influencer, rather than their audiences and followers. Thus, how followers construct and understand the authenticity of micro SMI’s is an emerging area of research. To contribute to this research area, this research investigated how followers understood the authenticity of eight micro SMIs based in Australia. To do so, 6508 followers’ comments were downloaded from the eight selected SMI posts and analysed using a traditional human interpretative thematic-analytical approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006). All of the SMIs focused on fashion because fashion SMIs are known to share their personality through their content (Chetioui et al., 2020), which provides audiences with resources to assess authenticity. The results found that followers used the SMI’s appearance to establish the authenticity of their content and posts. This was consistent on both sponsored posts, posts paid for by businesses and brands, as well as non-sponsored posts created by the SMI. Furthermore, sponsored posts were as likely to be seen as authentic compared to non-sponsored posts.