ABSTRACT Trust is the key for social media influencers to successfully persuade their followers and maintain their monetization capabilities. Considering that latent followers and existing followers place different emphases on trust toward social media influencers, this paper explores how social media influencers choose matching recommendation types when recommending products to latent and existing followers, that is, to enhance the trust of followers through heterogeneous recommendations, so as to increase their word‐of‐mouth intention and ultimately achieve effective product promotion. This paper conducted three scenario experiments to verify the hypothesis. This paper found that episodic recommendations for latent followers and semantic recommendations for existing followers could enhance their word‐of‐mouth intention. And these effects were only present under conditions of high influencer‐product fit. Moreover, this paper verified the mediating role of goodwill trust and capacity trust. This research not only enhances the application of human memory and the concepts of new and repeat customers in the relevant research of influencer marketing, but also provides practical guidance for career development of social media influencers, precise personalized push on social media platforms, and the selection of social media influencers by enterprises.
Xu et al. (Wed,) studied this question.