The Effect of Visual Influencer Marketing on Social Commerce Engagement: A Multi-Variable Approach

Social commerce can be defined as “an emerging trend in which sellers are connected in online social networks, and where sellers are individuals instead of firms” (Stephen & Toubia, 2010). Social commerce is becoming a critical platform in ecommerce, usually as a result of enhanced reputation of social-networking platforms including Facebook, Linkedln, and Twitter (Liang & Turban, 2011, Ho, Li, & Stephen & Toubia, 2010). With the recognition and business pride of social networking web sites and any other social media, social trade emerged as a conceived term in 2005, showing a rising (and developing) phenomenon (Rubel, 2005; David Beisel, 2024; Stephan & Toubia, 2010). The concept of social commerce initially appeared in 2005 via Yahoo! (Rubel, 2005). On November 11 of the same year, Yahoo! launched Shoposphere, one of the first forays into this idea (Rothberg, 2005). The site included a "Pick Lists" feature that enabled consumers to express opinions, comment on products, and give feedback, creating an extra enticing and network-based purchasing experience. The availability of user-generated content rendered Shoposphere a blog-like look, further increasing consumer engagement (Rothberg, 2005). In addition, social commerce has contributed greatly in bringing in new customers into online markets. Social media integration has facilitated peer-to-peer sharing, which is now a prominent trend, allowing companies like Uber and Airbnb producing very large amounts of user- generated content (Stephen & Toubia, 2010). This change is referred to as a shift towards a multi-user e-commerce system by Yamakami (2015), whereby interactions beyond company- consumer relationships are extended to highlight collaboration and online purchasing with social interaction. Therefore, social trading is a sort of trade that takes place online and offline through media with social purposes (C. Wang and Zhang 2012). Social commerce (or social trade) refers to a subcategory of e-commerce that utilizes social networking sites and Web 2.0 features (Busalim & Hussin, 2016). Social commerce defined by (Baghdadi, 2016) is defined as “a new way of engaging in trade, which includes collaboration between all actors within the value chain”. (Dennison et al., n.d.) applied IBM’s definition that “social commerce is the concept of word of mouth applied to e-commerce, and it is the combination of a retailer’s products, online content and shoppers’ interaction with that content”. Previous studies have defined s-trade as employing on line technologies to allow humans to have interaction through virtual answers and networks (Busalim & Hussin, 2016; Lin et al., 2017). In conventional e-commerce, buyers scan a virtual list of options prior to purchasing a product. Indeed, it is in the social-media platform. that buyers and sellers come to trade openly (Cao et al., 2020). From the definitions, this is clear that the notion of s-trade is still ambiguous until these days. Definitions view s-trade as “a multi-user-based e-commerce” (Yamakami, 2015), “technology- enabled shopping experiences” (Shen & Eder 2011), or “a various types of commercial and social activities” (Liang & Turban, 2011).