Play it safe or leave the comfort zone? Optimal content strategies for social media influencers on streaming video platforms

Social media influencers (SMIs) endeavor to attract, retain, and, more importantly, influence large audiences through creating videos on streaming video platforms (SVPs). Facing diverse audiences and intense competition, SMIs who differ in their skills and performance levels struggle with two challenging trade-offs in video production decision: (1) trade-off between reinforcement-seeking (i.e., reinforcing a specialized content style to play it safe) and variation-seeking (i.e., varying content style to leave the comfort zone), and (2) trade-off between early and late strategic action. This study explores the sweet spot of reinforcement- and variation-seeking by proposing a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP) model to maximize SMIs' influence on audiences on SVPs. Leveraging a series of musical videos produced by SMIs, our findings show that low-performing SMIs benefit more from variation-seeking than from reinforcement-seeking. By contrast, the influence of high-performing SMIs on audiences could be maximized by reinforcement- or variation-seeking, depending on the SMI type. High-performing SMIs' variation-seeking (should it be taken) is encouraged earlier than later over a planning horizon. This study contributes on on-demand content decision making and makes recommendations to SMIs and SVPs.