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Introduction
With the growing popularity of social media, many brands have changed their marketing communication strategies and are increasingly relying on social media to engage with consumers. Social media has spawned the rise of social media influencers who, as individual content creators, have utilized social media as a megaphone (Mcquarrie et al., 2013) to share their opinions with large audiences in an authentic manner (Morris and Anderson, 2015). For gaining the attention and trust of consumers, brands are using social media influencers whose social media accounts are followed by millions of people. A significant budget is devoted to influencer marketing (IM), with projected worldwide spending of USD 15 bn in 2022 (Waller, 2020). While 55.4% of companies employed IM in 2019, this number was reported as 62.3% for 2020 and is expected to touch 72.5% by 2022 (Williamson, 2021). With greater budget allocation, IM has emerged as an important research domain, with practitioners and researchers devoting time and resources to understand the phenomenon.
Even though IM is a recently emerged domain, the last few years have seen many papers with Scopus reporting more than 90 pieces published in 2020 alone. As the domain grows, there is a need to understand the scattered research in IM and the evolution of this domain. To understand this domain, we have used bibliometric analysis techniques that are considered unbiased and free from researchers' subjectivity (Baumgartner and Pieters, 2003). The study aims to understand the core knowledge structure of the IM domain. More specifically, we intend to develop the intellectual structure of the domain. With this study, we also identify an objective list of the most influential content, prolific and most cited researchers, their affiliations and networks among authors and journals, which can foster cooperation among current and prospective researchers in this domain. We also provide future research pathways in this field by providing a detailed set of recommendations for future research. Given the evolving nature of this domain, we think such an endeavor is important and timely. Understanding the budding nature of an emerging field is also not without precedence. Some of the previous bibliometric studies (e.g. Mustak et al., 2020) have been conducted on contemporary topics such as artificial intelligence.
This paper contributes in three important...