What is it about?
TikTok has become the dominant social media platform among young people, yet almost no academic research had examined what actually makes influencer marketing effective there. This study fills that gap by surveying 160 followers of a popular Spanish TikTok influencer to understand what drives people to keep following an account and to act on an influencer's advice. We analyzed four characteristics of influencer content — originality, quality, quantity, and humor — and measured how they affect followers' hedonic (pleasurable) experience and their perception of the influencer as an opinion leader. The results show that originality is the most powerful driver across the board. More surprisingly, humor — often treated as a peripheral or frivolous element — emerges as a uniquely important persuasion tool on TikTok, working through the hedonic experience it creates. Unlike more information-heavy platforms like Instagram, TikTok's short, informal, entertainment-first format means that making followers laugh is not a nice-to-have but a strategic necessity.
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Why is it important?
Influencer marketing is now a multi-billion-dollar industry, and TikTok is its fastest-growing channel. Yet brands and creators have been investing in TikTok largely without empirical evidence about what actually converts viewers into engaged followers and buyers. This research provides that evidence. It shows that the rules of influencer marketing on TikTok differ meaningfully from those on other platforms: posting more content can actually hurt hedonic experience, while humor — rarely studied in the influencer literature — can build opinion leadership indirectly by making the audience feel good. For brands targeting younger audiences, the practical implication is clear: partner with creators who can make their followers genuinely laugh, and trust that entertainment, not information density, is the path to persuasion.
Perspectives
What drew me to this research was how dramatically TikTok seemed to break the conventional logic of influencer marketing. When I first started analyzing it, the dominant academic models were built around credibility, expertise, and information quality — all central-route persuasion mechanisms. But TikTok felt fundamentally different: its best-performing content was not the most polished or informative, but the most spontaneous and funny. Integrating the Elaboration Likelihood Model with the SOR framework allowed us to theorize that difference rigorously, not just describe it. Seeing humor emerge empirically as a total mediator in the path to opinion leadership was one of those genuinely gratifying results — the data confirmed an intuition that the existing literature hadn't been equipped to capture.
Sergio Barta
Universidad de Zaragoza
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Influencer marketing on TikTok: The effectiveness of humor and followers’ hedonic experience, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, January 2023, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2022.103149.
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