The Impact of Social Media Influencers on Brand Awareness, Image and Trust in their Sponsored Content: An Empirical Study from Georgian Social Media Users

This study aims to find the impact of social media influencers on brand awareness, brand image, and trust in their sponsored content. For this purpose, influencers' traits were divided into intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics to measure their impact more accurately. Hypotheses were formulated, and a close-ended questionnaire was distributed to quantitatively analyse the effect of social media influencers. In total, 327 responses were collected for analysis. The results indicated that social media influencers' perceived intrinsic characteristics positively impact the level of brand awareness, and perceived extrinsic traits positively affect brand image, and trust in sponsored content. The research measures consumer reactions to influencer marketing among social media users. It contributes to overall knowledge about social media influencers` impacts on users through implications of attitudinal persuasion knowledge and self-perception theory. The findings shed light on the implications of social media influencers` traits in relation to how the sponsored brands and influencers` content are perceived by customers.