Social Media Sponsorship: Metrics and Strategies for Finding the Right Content Creator-Sponsor Matches

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Doosti, Shahryar; Lee, Stephanie; Tan, Yong
• 署名单位: Chapman University System; Chapman University; University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2023.01192
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: social media analytics; content creator; sponsorship relevance; Influencer Marketing; video content analysis; complex network theory

摘要

Social media video sponsorship, where sponsors partner with content creators to promote their brands, has become increasingly popular. Leveraging rich data on sponsored and nonsponsored videos on Facebook, we introduce two metrics, Content Similarity and Audience Closeness, to help sponsors find effective creator-sponsor matches. Content Similarity captures the thematic alignment between a creator's content and a sponsor's brand, whereas Audience Closeness measures how closely aligned a creator's and sponsor's audiences are within a social media network. We find that both metrics significantly increase video viewership, but their effects vary over time. Audience Closeness generates more immediate, short-term engagement, whereas Content Similarity drives sustained, long-term engagement. We additionally examine how congruency metrics can complement other sponsorship strategies, including partnering with more established creators, forming new partnerships, and managing the sponsor's visibility within content. Our findings suggest that Content Similarity can mitigate the negative effects of frequent sponsor appearances and enhance viewer engagement, even in repetitive partnerships. Moreover, we find that Audience Closeness is particularly beneficial for larger, more established creators, whereas Content Similarity is less sensitive to the size of a creator's following. Finally, we demonstrate how intermediary platforms can adopt these metrics to reduce information asymmetry and improve creator-sponsor matching, especially for long-tail creators and smaller brands.