UConn marketing professor Nicholas Lurie and two colleagues have found a little-known method for significantly enhancing social media influencer marketing.

In a recently published article in the Journal of Marketing, the researchers highlight how seeding the combination of a prominent influencer and a follower boosts the spread of an endorsement up to fivefold.

“Both researchers and marketers have traditionally believed that the key to social media messaging is to find the influencer with the largest social network,’’ Lurie says.

“But they haven’t looked at the role of social media followers, and we found that to be very significant,’’ he says. By carefully selecting followers to immediately engage with an influencer’s post — by reposting, replying or commenting — marketers can increase the post’s spread.

The research is predicated on the psychological insight that social media users are more likely to engage with content when they see others lending credence to products or ideas.

Evidence From Korean Music Study Transcends Industries

The researchers chose social media posts about Korean music as the focus of their investigation. But the results are relevant across industries, as brands invest heavily in social media to enhance their audience reach, Lurie says.

The article, titled “Seeding Social Affirmation: Influencer + Follower Seeding Strategies and the Diffusion of Online Word-of-Mouth,’’ is the culmination of three years of research by Lurie, Hee Mok Park of the University of Guelph in Canada, and Minki Kim of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea.

Their findings involved culling social media data, lab experiments, field experiments, and simulations.

An influencer-plus-follower seeding strategy, in which the best influencer-follower pair in a social network is chosen to share and reshare a message, outperforms an influencer-only strategy, Lurie says. Selecting a follower with an overlapping network helps amplify the message.

“If an influencer tweets about new music and a follower retweets it, this provides affirmation that others within the social network value this information, leading receivers to be more likely to forward the tweet. People tend to want to forward information that others also think is valuable,’’ Lurie says.

Based on what they discovered, Lurie says if he had $10,000 to spend on social media strategy, he would invest it in hiring an influencer and a strategically selected follower, instead of two influencers.

“It may be somewhat surprising, but we found that combination yielded superior results to using two influencers,’’ he says.

Posts Can Increase Up to Fivefold

Across the evaluations, campaigns that matched influencers with strategically selected followers consistently generated more online word-of-mouth buzz than campaigns that engaged influencers alone.

Compared with traditional influencer-only campaigns, the influencer-plus-follower model increased the likelihood of posting by as much as fivefold, and improved word-of-mouth spread by approximately 80%.

Their findings also helped identify which followers were most significant. The strongest results came from followers who were highly embedded in the influencer’s community, sharing mutual connections with other followers. These “embedded’’ followers provided strong affirmation because their engagement was already more visible and respected within the network.

Three Seeded Influencers is the Ideal Number

Another interesting finding was that selecting a small number of followers to amplify a message was productive, but adding too many decreased success. Three seeded followers, it turned out, outperformed four, implying that excessive coordination may feel artificial rather than authentic, Lurie says.

The influencer-follower strategy is not applicable in every scenario, the researchers caution. It works most successfully on platforms and in product categories where social affirmation shapes behavior such as entertainment, music, fashion, and lifestyle brands.

In scenarios where users prioritize information over opinion, a conventional influencer marketing may still be the better approach.

For marketers, the research offers a new perspective. Instead of focusing on influencer campaigns as “one voice to many’’ presentations, brand managers should view them as carefully orchestrated social interactions, Lurie says. Success may hinge less on finding mega influencers than on activating the right community members to spark engagement.