Mental Health and Social Capital: How Influencers Use Mental Health Topics to Promote Products and Drive Engagement

Itai Himelboim, Golan, G., Kogan, S. & Oshri, A. “Mental Health and Social Capital: How Influencers Use Mental Health Topics to Promote Products and Drive Engagement,” accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Research in Advertising. Barcelona, Spain. Abstract: This study applies a three-dimensional social capital framework, encompassing structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions, to sponsored Instagram posts in which influencers use mental health narratives to promote products and services, and extends the same framework to the co-promotional network connecting those influencers through shared product category promotion. The two-level design tests whether social capital dimensions that shape audience engagement at the post level also organize influencer positioning at the network level. At the content level, the relational dimension, which captures personal disclosure, emotional reciprocity, and authenticity signaling, is the only dimension that consistently drives audience engagement, while the structural dimension suppresses it by making the commercial architecture of the post visible and activating persuasion knowledge. The cognitive dimension functions as a facilitating condition rather than an independent driver. At the network level, the structural dimension predicts both the breadth and prestige of an influencer's co-promotional connections, while the relational dimension predicts structural brokerage between product communities but constrains access to high-reach commercial hubs, consistent with authentic niche community membership rather than elite commercial embeddedness. The cognitive dimension again plays a facilitative role, paralleling its content-level pattern. These relationships are substantially stronger in trust-sensitive product categories. Taken together, the findings establish relational authenticity as the decisive social capital resource at both the message and the network level.