Social Media Influencers as Mediators of Commercial Messages

Abstract Social media influencers are integral to contemporary organizations’ marketing strategies. Despite growing interest in the topic, there is scant knowledge of how organizations manage and collaborate with influencers in their content production during commercial collaborations. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and a semiotic analysis of social media content, this study elucidates the dynamics of organizations’ commercial collaborations with influencers and discusses how influencers decode and transmit organizations’ commercial messages to their followers in the destination marketing context. Social reality and commercial messages are enmeshed in the content narrative and interpreted by the influencer and their knowledge of their audience into what they could mean and become in the semiotic and symbolic landscapes of social media environments. Thus, an influencer’s interpretation of organization’s commercial messages is embedded in the social media environment.