Faces engage social media influencers' followers

Purpose: Aim of the research was to test whether social media influencers (SMI) can enhance their followers’ engagement by uploading post containing human face in it.Design/Methodology/Approach: The population was Croatian SMIs with more than ten thousand followers out of which 51 was sampled. Unit of analysis was Instagram post. Each SMI was represented with ten posts totaling to 510 Instagram posts that were analyzed for number of likes and comments, presence of a face in it and SMIs number of followers and the number of posts that s/he uploaded was controlled for.Findings and implications: Aside from the numerical SMI operationalization, the main finding is that presence of a face in post is related to the higher number of likes but not to the higher number of comments. Faces, thus, lead to more low-level engagement but not to higher-level engagement.Limitations: Lack of SMIs operationalization lead to the more conservative sample of SMIs with more than 10k followers which means that micro-influencers were left out of the research. Originality: Apart from the previous research done in the context of everyday Instagram