Social Media Influencer Marketing: Building a Deeper Understanding through Bibliometric Analysis

Influencer marketing (IM) is growing in popularity, and many advertisers intend to either start using influencers or utilize them more regularly in their media combinations. Despite the expansion in this field, there remains a lack of academic or strategic insights pertinent to influencers. Our goal in doing this bibliometric analysis is to assess the global trends in IM domain from 2011 to 2022 based on publication output, co-occurrence, co-citation, co-authorship analysis, country collaboration maps, tree map and a three-field plot analysis. The present study included 560 articles for study from the Scopus database. BiblioShiny and VOSviewer packages are used for the analysis. To offer further context, we explore various charts, tables and diagrams in this research that include the publishing year, leading authors, journals, countries collaborations and author keywords. A qualitative analysis is conducted on the top 20 documents based on their times cited per year (TCpY). The result indicates that the number of publications is continuously increasing in the field of IM. This bibliometric analysis offers a complete overview of the subject and advises researchers conducting IM research to concentrate on current issues to add new data and insights to the literature.