Digital Media Influencers: A Systematic Literature Review

The popularity of social media influencers (SMIs) has been growing exponentially in recent years, making influencer marketing (IM) a predominant business strategy. Even though there is growing interest from researchers and practitioners, most academic work continues to be divergent, partial, and fragmented. In light of the pivotal role SMIs play in consumer decisions and the fact that this field of research is still in its developmental stages, a comprehensive and critical view of existing research on this topic is greatly needed. This paper is a response to this and is the first to consolidate the current state of IM research within social media settings. More precisely, this paper presents a systematic literature review of relevant studies published in academic journals and magazines in order to identify key themes and dominant concepts in the field. Our analysis of 31 articles from 14 different journals helped give a broader understanding of this phenomenon. Through our analysis we identified a number of research gaps. We then proposed directions for future research to reflect on important emerging areas and unexplored domains with reference to theory, context, and methodology. Lastly, we discuss the implications of this study in theory and practice. The main limitations of the study come from the fact that it only considers articles written in the English language, it is only published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and it is limited to just three online platforms. This study is a first in that it provides a systematic overview of existing literature on digital media influencers.