A Dual-Role Trust Model for Social Media Influencers: The Paradox of Perceived Friendship

As companies come to appreciate social media’s economic advantages, it has transformed into a dichotomous social-commercial landscape. In this specific situation, followers evaluate social media influencers that play both the friend and marketer roles in the decision-making process. This study creates a dual-role trust model based on the role theory to investigate trust processes across different roles. More importantly, this study goes deeper into examining the potential paradoxical positive and negative moderating roles of perceived friendship in the dual-role trust mechanism. The structural equation model approach is first conducted to test our hypotheses using a survey of 465 TikTok respondents. Next, the study model’s hypotheses are further tested using a post hoc analysis to see if they change based on followers’ regulatory focus. The findings support perceived friendship’s complementary and replacement functions in a dual role-based trust mechanism, as well as the transfer of trust between dual roles. There is a discussion of the implications for theory and practice.