Finfluencers in digital finance: a bibliometric mapping of social media research and behavioural finance perspectives

This study offers a bibliometric mapping of the intellectual landscape of finfluencer research, based on 174 Scopus-indexed papers published from 2002 to 2025, using VOS viewer and bibliometrix. The first documented paper was published in 2017, and the annual volume of published papers almost doubled to 49 in 2025. While the United States had the greatest citation impact (1655), India had the highest number of frequent publications (38 papers). Co-occurrence keyword analysis indicated four main thematic clusters: social media marketing, consumer behaviour, strategic marketing, and digital engagement and illustrated the paucity of finance perspectives, such as overconfidence, herding behaviour and loss aversion, that would be useful to understand retail investors’ decision-making, while showing significant relevance to retail investors. This research has made two contributions to theory: the first contribution is to identify finfluencer research as being an independent bibliometric sub-domain; the second contribution is to develop a theoretical cross-disciplinary framework that connects media influence, the influencer perspective, and behavioural finance and establishes a basis for building future empirical inquiries into finfluencer-related investor psychology.